A study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that the media in all countries tended to under-report climate science during the UN's Copenhagen summit on climate change last year. Less than a tenth of the coverage surveyed was principally about the science of climate change, and 80% of the 400 articles studied mentioned the science in less than 10% of their column space, the RISJ clarified.

The Western press quoted views of climate change sceptics but these were not covered by media in the developed world. The question of how to cover climate change issues while including but not giving undue space to climate scepticism has been debated at length. As journalists instinctively seek to give a voice to both sides of a story, some argue that they have given climate sceptics too much credibility.

Of the twelve countries studied, Brazil and India provided the most coverage of the summit, followed by Australia and the UK. Nigeria, Russia and Egypt gave the summit the least space. 85% of the 4000 journalists who attended the summit were from the developed world, but China and Brazil had more than 100 journalists each.

USA Today has only five reporters covering Congress, but 27 covering entertainment news, the Gannett Blog reported, after its editor Jim Hopkins obtained copies of newsroom flow charts dated October 21-22. Hopkins, a former USA Today reporter, believes that "this is the first time USAT's editorial staffing breakdown has been made public."

The document showing the distribution of staff shows that as well as the five staff allocated to Congress/Politics, there are another six assigned to White House/Legal, another four to Federal and five to Economy/Jobs. This total number covering political issues is still less than the 27 focused on entertainment however, which accounts for by far the largest group.

There are now five Investigations reporters and five Database, six War/Defense, six Science/Energy/Environment , eight Your Life (a newly introduced section in both print and online), ten Travel and 13 Tech/Autos, for example.

As more news about the Daily Beast's merger with Newsweek emerges, more and more questions are springing up regarding the editoral changes that will be made to the publications now that the online news-aggregation site and 77-year-old award-winning weekly magazine have joined forces.

Following in the footsteps of other recent mergers like Bloomberg and BusinessWeek, Politico and its newspaper, the Daily Beast and Newsweek will hopefully complement each other and contribute what the other lacks. Though it is unclear how closely the two will work and how much cross-over of content there might be, Tina Brown, the now Editor-in-Chief of both publications said she thinks the merge "is a good model."

So what will the two publications get out of each other? The Guardian says Daily Beast will benefit from Newsweek's pre-established audience and print component which still attracts high advertising revenues. Newsweek, on the other hand, will gain a promising web market - five million unique visitors to be more exact.

Alexander Lebedev is planning to set up a fund to support journalistic investigations into large-scale corruption, reported Press Gazette. Lebedev, owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard, who also has media interests in his home country of Russia, was speaking at a Society of Editors conference in Glasgow.

Such a foundation would give grants and prizes to organisations worldwide to carry out investigative journalism projects, he said. The fund could be in partnership with Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev explained, launched as part of a series of events to celebrate the former Russian head of state's 80th birthday.

Joint with Gorbachev, Lebedev owns Novaya Gazeta, a Russian paper that has been critical of the government and that has seen several of its journalists murdered. The dangers for journalists in Russia have recently attracted international attention after Kommersant reporter Oleg Kashin was beaten almost to death on 6 November having recently covered anti-Kremlin protests, and two regional reporters were attacked on 8 November. There have reportedly been 19 murders of journalists in Russia since 2000 that remain unsolved.

Technology start up Attributor, which has developed software to track how online news content is being used around the web, discovered in a study this year more than 400,000 unlicensed full copies of news articles across 44,906 sites. The five-month trial was conducted from March to July and involved "many of the nation's leading news organizations," a press release said. 70,101 articles had been copied.

The Graduated Response Trial for News also found that 75% of the sites that were copying full articles complied with the rights holders' subsequent requests to pursue licensing agreements or voluntarily removed the content. The "Graduated Response" concept in practice meant that courtesy notices of unlicensed copying were sent to the owners of 107 randomly-selected sites and removal requests were sent to the search engines to remove the listing from results and to ad networks to remove ads on the page of the copied content.

James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert and head of his father's News Corp operations in Europe and Asia, said that newspaper apps are cannibalizing the print product, and reaffirmed his company's belief that content should not be given away for free, if it is to be effectively monetised.

"The problem with the apps is they're much more directly cannibalistic of the core print product than the web site," Murdoch said at the Monaco Media Forum, quoted by paidContent. "People interact with it much more like they do with the traditional product."

This latter statement reflects a belief that has usually been seen as a positive aspect of applications on the iPad and other tablets, or even on smartphones: that they offer the possibility to create a more coherent reading experience and a package that is more similar to a print paper with a more controlled narrative than online.

Newsweek and The Daily Beast website are to merge in a 50/50 joint venture, called the Newsweek Daily Beast Company, Daily Beast editor Tina Brown announced on her site late last night and the two organisations announced today. Brown will be editor-in-chief of both The Daily Beast, a website that curates aggregated news and produces original reporting and opion and Newsweek, a print weekly.

Brown described the merger between the 77-year-old magazine and two-year old website as "a wonderful new opportunity for all the brilliant editors and writers at The Daily Beast who have worked so hard to create the site's success." For the Beast writers, "we now add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print," and for Newsweek, "The Daily Beast is a thriving frontline of breaking news and commentary that will raise the profile of the magazine's bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine's revival," she said.

The Oregonian has plans to extend its hyperlocal strategy, Editor & Publisher reports. The publication, which already has 17 hyperlocal community pages on its web-partner Oregon Live, says it will be "adding more content to the existing pages and creating new ones in 2011."

The hyperlocal site focuses on sectional community news and allows readers to post relevant comments, news and event information on town-specific public blogs. Oregonian editor Peter Bhatia said, "They create room for a depth and breadth of community-level news that we never have had room for in the paper."

He also notes that the hyperlocal pages also deliver content to its Saturday "Community News" section which "combines several neighboring communities into one section and include items posted to the community public blogs."

Aiming to offer more health and well being content relating to American families, USA Today has launched a new section online and in print called "Your Life," according to a press release posted on PRNewsWire.com today.

This new feature will aim to provide readers with informative tools to care for themselves and their families, nourish their bodies, and address challenges. Your Life will also try to help readers integrate the day's insights into their daily routine, the news publisher reported.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

The Daily Telegraph has launched a new look for its website, which includes the change of the masthead from "Telegraph.co.uk" to "The Telegraph," to more closely echo that of the print products.

"We're calling the overall effect a 'refresh,' much more than adding a new coat of paint but short of a comprehensive redesign," explained The Daily Telegraph in a article. The goal was to harmonize the design of the print and online versions, as well as mobile site and the apps.

Furthermore, the home page has now a space to exhibit featured videos and images, as well as a block dedicated science, health and earth coverage. Journalists have their own pages, a press release said, and "each section of the website will have a significantly greater amount of editorial content available at the click of a button." The redesign also hopes to make sharing content easier through social networks.

According to The Guardian, "this is the first revamp of the Telegraph digital presence since editor-in-chief Will Lewis quit" last May. Digital editor Edward Roussel was in charge of the changes, which were carried out by an in-house team of designers and developers.

Media commentator Clay Shirky has written an interesting post assessing the Times and Sunday Times paywalls. Shirky argues that the figures released last week on the paywalls erected by owner News International in July aren't ground-breaking news in themselves: the figures are pretty much what one would expect based on the market. But something about this paywall and the reaction to it "feels different," he said.

"It's new because the people paying attention to it are now willing to regard the results as evidence of something. To the newspaper world, TimesSelect [a New York Times paid online content effort] looked like an experiment. The Times and Sunday Times look like a referendum on the future," he said.