In conjunction with Twitter and the CFJ journalism school (Centre de Formation des Journalistes), the international newswire Agence France-Presse (APF) has launched a YouTube channel dedicated to covering the 2012 French presidential elections.

The channel hosts videos posted by political parties and tracks candidate popularity, but its main feature is an interface in which viewers can submit questions to candidates. The questions are then posed in interviews held by journalism students from CFJ.

Apple's iPad has become a beacon of hope in the newspaper industry's quest to monetize content, although skeptics like Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner caution that it may take "decades" before the move becomes profitable. Nevertheless, a few papers in Europe and the US have recently issued iPad applications, hoping to use the digital medium as an opportunity for innovation.

The San Francisco Chronicle introduced its new iPad app this morning. The paper's print edition has been in decline since 2001, but its online readership has grown since the launch of SFGate, making it a major online U.S. paper. The release of the iPad application is another means to reach the paper's consumers who live outside of the Bay Area, the SF Chronicle explained on its site. The app will differentiate itself from SFgate by releasing pictures and videos exclusive to the tablet, as well as interactive links to share content on Twitter and Facebook.

The last rural news bureau in Eastern Kentucky is closing, according to Daily Yonder.

Kentucky's rural bureaus were historically responsible for bringing urban attention to injustices in small communities. The article notes that the effort to end strip coal mining was borne out of the coverage by reporters at Eastern Kentucky bureaus.

The Daily Yonder elaborates on the importance of local bureaus as a tool to link rural areas to larger cities and argues that local coverage enforced a Kentucky state identity in spite of social inequalities. In Eastern Kentucky, local news once ensured that national policies could address small town issues. In the current absence of a local print news source, rural communities face isolation on a state and national level.

One possible solution to this issue lies online.

Criticized for the threat it poses to local media, AOL's hyper-local news site Patch is one example of a response to the rapidly changing news industry. Although it has not expanded into Kentucky, Patch's niche news distribution is one alternative to traditional print press.

With "A week on Foursquare" the Wall Street Journal collected every check-in on location-sharing service Foursquare for a week starting at noon Eastern on Friday, Jan. 21 until noon on Friday Jan. 28. It revealed, through a visualization, how people live, Information aesthetics reported.

Journalism.co.uk reported that the Visual Communication Lab, part of the IBM Center for Social Software has created a site to provide a visualisation - NYT Writes, created by research developer Irene Ros - to show what subjects New York Times journalists are writing about.

Nonprofit news organisations seem to be gaining traction in the news industry. For anyone interested in the nonprofit model, The Texas Tribune, launched at the end of 2009, is one of the most interesting outlets to follow. Evan Smith, the editor-in-chief of the site, spoke recently to Business Insider about the organisation and its experience with the not-for-profit news model.

The site has seen a healthy flow of visitors since its inception - it exceeded its expectations in six months - and last Wednesday it set a daily record of 60,000 unique visitors. But traffic is one thing; sustainability is a harder nut to crack. The Texas Tribune has raised over $9 million and has also other revenue streams. This gave reason for Smith to believe that the nonprofit model could provide a sustainable future: "I'm ever more confident every single day."

It seems that steady funding is, at least partly, a consequence of quality content: The Texas Tribune has already won journalism awards and has a content partnership with the New York Times.

2010 was the year of the paywall.
Trying to figure out how to transit newspapers' print businesses to the digital world, one of the big questions was: is charging online the way to go?

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was one of those to lead the way in charging for online content, putting the UK Times and Sunday Times behind a paywall in July 2010.

Before the News Corp group, the German publisher Alex Springer began charging for online access with some of its newspapers.

It was actually a path already chosen by some niche publications, which provided (and still provide) specialized content, like financial and business news.
Within financial news publications, amongst the first ones to charge for content were the Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch originally pointed as a model to follow, and the Economist, which introduced between the end of 2009 and beginning 2010 a paywall for the print-edition content on its website.
It has to be noted however that financial news is an area in which subscribers might be more willing to pay for online.

Today, at the second day of the e-G8 forum, Arthur Sulzberger of The New York Times and Robert Thomson of The Wall Street Journal attended the panel about disintermediation ("Is the Internet Relaunching or Killing the Media?"), as the New York Observer reported.
The line of questioning has been predictable: Here comes the web encroaching on traditional media business models--how do you tame it for your own financial ends?, the article wrote.

Jack Shenker, a Guardian correspondent, who claimed he was beaten and arrested while reporting on the Egypt uprisings, won the Gaby Radio memorial award at the Amnesty International UK media awards, Journalism.co.uk reported.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been holding a forum in Paris on May 24-25, ahead of the G8 conference that will start on Thursday 26th May in Deauville.

The forum, dubbed the e-G8, focuses on the future of the Web and its sovereignty and brings together the biggest names in Internet business and new media, including Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, News Corp's Rupert Murdoch and Google's Eric Schmidt, Deutsche Welle reported.

Amongst the main issues addressed during the conference were the regulation of the World Wide Web, privacy and copyright, and net neutrality.

Critics said that some countries are going in the direction of restricting Internet freedoms and handing the net control to companies and governments, going against the principle of the net neutrality (which is a principle that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers' access to networks that participate in the internet).

Patrick Kerley on Mashable analysed, given the impact social media had on global activism, how activist inverstors used them to overthrow boards, oust embattled CEOs, and reverse well-entrenched business practices at some of America's most well-known corporations.

Dan Sabbagh in the Guardian reflected on the aftermath of Twitter revelations about details covered by injunctions in the UK, and the effect this could have on national media by challenging privacy laws and restraints on the media.

Fewer than half of US national newspapers and lifestyle magazines have a mobile-optimized website, Brand Republic reported. A third of these titles have an iPhone app.

Search Engine Land wrote about the effect Facebook Like buttons and plugins can have on website traffic. According to the figures, the average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300 percent rise in referral traffic.

AGCOM, the Italian communications watchdog authority, has imposed fines on five national newscasts for violating elections rules by allowing prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to rally voter on air ahead of a second round of local polls without including opposition views, adnkronos reported.

The regulator body imposed the maximum permitted fine of €258,230 on the TG1, the newscast of the principal public broadcasting channel RAI, and on TG4, one of the Berlusconi's private Mediaset news bulletins, since they are repeat offenders, and fines of €100,000 each on TG2, the second public channel, TG5 and Studio Aperto, again owned by Berlusconi's Mediaset, Corriere della Sera reported.

As the adnkronos article explained, in a series of interviews aired 20 May, Berlusconi sought to mobilise his centre-right political base for the mayoral run-offs being held this weekend in many Italian cities, branding the centre-left opposition as "extremist".

There are seven national news channels in Italy, so only two newscasts, the last public one TG3 and La7 were not fined.

Two new reports provide valuable information for anyone involved in iPad app or website design. A study by the web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen examined iPad usability, while Miratech, a French user experience consulting firm, looked into the differences between reading on the iPad and a printed newspaper.

Nielsen Norman Group released its first report on iPad app usability a year ago, and the new study compares current apps with the findings of the earlier report. In sum, iPad apps have much improved, but some new usability issues have emerged.

Generally, apps have become more consistent and standardised, the study found. It noted that although many designers seemed to have taken heed of the earlier study's recommendations, some familiar issues were still found.

For example, many websites still feature content that is uncomfortably small to tap. Also the problem of having touchable areas too close together, increasing the risk of tapping the wrong one, still exists in some apps. Accidental activation is particularly annoying if the app lacks an obvious "back" button.

From among new usability issues that were discovered, swipe ambiguity, which occurs when several items on the screen can be swiped, is one of the most prominent ones. When the user swipes at a "wrong" spot, the effect is not what he expects. This can happen when, for example, swiping on a carousel on an app that uses swiping also to change the page.