It has been years since the news industry started to wonder about the future of journalism in the digital age and how to make the transition from a printed world to a digital one.

"How to be profitable online? To charge or not to charge? Integrated or separated newsrooms?"
All these kind of questions have dominated the news media's thoughts.

Well, there is a weekly magazine in France that didn't asked itself all these questions and simply remained the same as it has been for about the last 90 years.

It's the weekly investigative-satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné and things there seem to go be going pretty well.

Printed in only two colours, the eight-page broadsheet "carries no photographs or advertising, its articles are unsigned and the newspaper shuns the web - yet somehow it manages to outsell rivals such as Le Monde. Just how does it do it?", wondered the Irish Times.

The article noted that while France's newspapers are facing misfortune, as the western print media industry generally is, Le Canard is thriving, enjoying an abundance of three things every newspaper craves: readers, influence and profit.

Thousands of newspapers world-wide will commemorate World Press Freedom Day on Tuesday, 3 May, by publishing thoughtful editorial and provocative advertising materials from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). There is still time to join them.

WAN-IFRA has made available essays, opinion pieces, interviews, infographics, editorial cartoons, photographs, advertisements and more for publication on or around 3 May, and has just added an editorial from The Elders, an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. The materials are available, free of charge, here.

The package, which focuses on the theme, "Silence kills democracy, but a free press talks", is available in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian and for the first time, Arabic.

The ongoing demonstrations for freedom in the Arab world is the subject of the new op-ed piece contributed by The Elders, written by two members of the group: Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and a Nobel Laureate, and Lakhdar Brahimi, former Foreign Minister of Algeria and former UN Special Envoy.

BBC News has a new social media editor, Chris Hamilton, who joined the BBC in 2000 and will also manage the existing user generated content hub within BBC Newswire, as Journalism.co.uk reported. Hamilton will succeed Alex Gubbay, who is leaving the BBC to join Johnston Press in June as head of digital content.

New Indian regulations restricting Web content provoked protesters within free speech advocates and Internet users. The New York Times reported that the new rules, quietly issued by the country's Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list of criteria, which includes anything that "threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order."

The Royal Wedding is swiftly approaching.
Tomorrow, April 29th, Prince William and Kate Middleton will get married, under worldwide scrutiny.
The wedding fever is spreading, as well as scepticism about the prominence the event is obtaining.

Media around the world have directed the spotlight on the event and madness seems to be spreading among fans. (You can see some telling photos of fans and bookmakers around Westminster Abbey, provided by the citizen journalism image agency Citizenside, here.) Some items of memorabilia lie somewhere between amazing and insane.

The BBC will provide streamed footage and a live stream of the ceremony will be featured also by the official YouTube channel of the British Monarchy. As previously reported, the BBC was said to be devoting an enormous 850 staff to cover the event while Sky and ITV have 460 people there. An estimate said 8,000 reporters would be in London to cover the wedding.

PBS's MediaShift's Carrie Lozano discussed collaboration between Frontline, ProPublica and NPR. The three news organisations came together to work on Post Mortem, an examination of flaws in death investigation in America. Susanne Reber, NPR's deputy managing editor of investigations, called the project an "unprecedented moment in journalism" in terms of the number of people involved and the amount of content produced. The joint effort resulted in an episode of Frontline, a series of NPR stories and a number of online and print pieces by ProPublica and Californian Watch.

Lozano discussed some of the challenges the people working on the project faced, some of them generalising to co-operative journalistic endeavours in general. She sees collaborating as a different form of journalistic work that comes with different kinds of challenges, making it "exciting, promising and a little messy."

"The issue is not about whether we're going to be reading off of paper or whether we'll be reading off backlit screens or whether we're going to be reading on the moon. The future belongs to visionary and courageous people to get the power back to the editorial floor".

Thus spoke Tyler Brûlé, the founder of Monocle Magazine, interviewed by Gopher Illustrated about his magazine and the business model behind it.

Brûlé founded Monocle in 2007 after having founded and directed the magazine Wallpaper*. Monocle, which has become not only a magazine but also a brand, bases its economic model on high quality content in a glossy, bookish, printed format.

As Business Week reported last year, in 2010 Monocle, three years old, boasted a global circulation nearing 150,000, a 35 percent annual increase at a time when magazine sales were supposed to be going in other direction, and a rising subscription base of 16,000. "If that sounds small, consider that these individuals pay $150 for 10 issues, a 50 percent premium over the newsstand price", the article said.

The last installment of the AOL/Huffington Post story was the lawsuit of $105 million that angry unpaid Huffington Post bloggers filed against Arianna Huffington after AOL paid $315 million for her publication.

But Huffington seems not particularly concerned about it, according to Jeff Bercovici, as Patch, AOL's network of hyperlocal news sites, announced its intention to recruit 8,000 more bloggers in the next few days.

Bercovici reported a Patch's internal memo by editor-in-chief Brian Farnham, in which he told editors to start recruiting volunteer bloggers in view of the launch of Patch's blog platform on May 4.
"The introduction of blogging on our sites is far more than just the release of a new feature," wrote Farnham, according to Bercovici, "It is a full-on course correction heading Patch in the direction we want to go".

On Sunday April 24 Wikileaks began publishing 779 classified US documents from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, the site announced adding that details about prisoners - terrorist suspects - detained in Guantanamo, the prison in Cuba opened in 2002, would be released daily.

On the Guardian website, David Leigh, the paper's investigations editor, explained the importance of the files and how in key cases they expose official lies. He reported that the files were shared with the Guardian and US National Public Radio by The New York Times, which says it did not obtain them from Wikileaks.

"The Guantánamo files consist of 759 "detainee assessment" dossiers written between 2002 and 2009 and sent up through the military hierarchy to the US Southern Command headquarters in Miami. They appear to cover all but 20 of the prisoners", the article said.

A number of other documents in the cache spell out guidelines for interrogating and deciding the fate of detainees. One, the "JTF-GTMO matrix of threat indicators" details the "indicators" which should be used to "determine a detainee's capabilities and intentions to pose a terrorist threat if the detainee were given the opportunity." Another provides a matrix for deciding whether a prisoner should be held or released, the article also reported.

As the ever-changing media landscape is making old business models obsolete for news providers, what means are there to make journalism a profitable business? Jeff Jarvis is the latest industry expert to discuss the issue, giving a very economics-based take on it. According to him, a news provider has to give serious thought to its revenue model: providing quality news is not in itself profitable.

Some observers, such as FishbowlNY, commented that Jarvis's thoughts on the state of the news industry seem very grim. What is perhaps most worrying is that many of the challenges he discussed are already widely recognised as real, but the industry has been late to act on them.

Certain prospects for the future are so certain that the industry should acknowledge and adapt to them, Jarvis stressed. Old revenue models for newspapers and news organisations cannot serve as models for the future. Newspapers' circulation will only continue to decline, as will also ad revenues. There is no going back to what the news industry was like before.

The Aurora Media Group plans on continuing its changes by putting its daily newspapers online and having a weekly, expanded print version, reported Editor and Publisher. "Our decision to transform ourselves into a digital media company is consistent with the way people consume and produce news. It is the future of local media," said Aurora Sentinel and Buckley Guardian Publisher James Gold.

Despite having low ad sales, Tina Brown's Newsweek has been doing well in terms of sales. Compared with averages from last year, first issue sales were up 19 percent, according to Adweek. The next two issues were up as well at 7 and 21 percent respectively.

Owni announced the top 60 French news sites. L'Equipe, Le Monde, and Le Figaro held the top three spots. It also listed the top 15 regional sites. The entire list is available here.

These are busy days for the industry of personalized news.

On Wednesday, April 21st the Washington Post launched its news aggregation site Trove, and on Thursday, April 22nd the New York Times launched its news aggregation iPad app, News.me.

Peter Kafka from MediaMemo reported previously this week that the app's website had been updated with new information and a "coming soon" announcement, and that the app was getting ready to launch.

News.me's aim is to provide filtered and personalized social news streams to users. Other apps exist with the same purpose, like Zite and Flipboard.

Even though they have more or less the same goal, they differ in some aspects.

News.me