With News of the World gone, there is plenty of room for competition to swoop in on tabloid readers. It's three main competitors, The Sunday Mirror, The Daily Star, and The People (as well as a few other publications) stand to profit.

According to The Guardian, the Daily Star Sunday is planning to do just that. Last Sunday, it saw sales jump up by nearly a quarter as readers rushed to get more news on the NoW phone hacking scandal. The Star added a badge to the front cover, cheekily proclaiming, "Change up to the Daily Star Sunday, a paper you can trust!" This Sunday, it will be doubling the print run in anticipation of reader interest.

Celebrity news gets high page view impact. High culture wins credibility. Some newspapers deliver one in order to fund the other, and online news sources are on the same track. The Huffington Post announced that it is expanding in both domains, while USA Today is taking on The New York Times with the launch a book site earlier this week.

The HuffPo Celebrity section is already live, taking over content from AOL's PopEater, a celebrity gossip site. While the PopEater site is still running, it has a huge banner across the top linking to its new home at The Huffington Post. This "new home" is the HuffPo's first official section dedicated to celebrity gossip, although it has always covered fluffy entertainment news. The difference is that now the news will be churned out with more focus and frequency.

Balancing the first announcement, The Huffington Post will also be introducing HuffPo Culture. The new section has not gone live yet, but is promised to fill the space between "the arts and its society", according to the new culture editor, Gazelle Emami. In typical interactive Huffington Post style, the Culture section hopes to extend beyond a news source and become a vibrant forum for debate on highbrow films, books, and art.

It seems that trawling Twitter can make you a lot of money these days, as U.K. firm DataSift gets $6 million in investment, according to PaidContent. What's more, it would seem that integration of apps with Twitter is more widespread than ever, having grown massively over the past year.

A survey by The Economist reveals that paid-for daily newspaper circulation has fallen by 11% in North America but is up by 5% in South America, where in countries like Brazil, social media is growing less rapidly than the printed press.

The Murdoch News of the World scandal continues, but, on his Forbes blog, Jeff Bercovici demonstrates why News Corp. may benefit from the British Sky Broadcasting bid being examined by the British Competition Commission.

For more industry news please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service

The Huffington Post is again getting attention over the treatment of its writers. After Ad Age's Simon Demunco wrote about how the Huffington Post had used Ad Age's content but failed to drive significant traffic to the site in exchange, Peter Goodman, the Huffington Post's executive business editor, responded by saying that the criticism was completely valid. He said that the writer of the offending post had been suspended indefinitely.

At a time when newspapers are scrambling to hire social media editors and incorporate users' reporting, the Associated Press is moving in the opposite direction.

In an effort to defend quality journalism, the AP has hired the public relations company Speed Communications. The PR move aims to distance the AP from social media and the inconsistent reporting that accompanies it, instead emphasizing the news organization's old school credibility. According to PR Week, Speed Communications will build the AP brand over a few years, launching a campaign of issues-led, thought leadership and corporate programmes.

Considering the AP's industry clout, hiring a PR firm to reinforce the brand is a surprising move. How could one of the world's largest and most reliable news organisations feel so threatened by social media?

"Thank you & goodbye", read the headline of the last edition of News of the World, published yesterday. The newspaper quit its operations after a series of revelations, most glaring being the paper's involvement in the hacking of the voice mail of a disappeared 13-year-old girl.

The Sunday paper's closure was announced only four days earlier, and although the British media industry is still recovering from the move, it seems likely that it will be profoundly affected, in one way or the other, by current circumstances.

Last week, the British Prime Minister David Cameron called for the replacement of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which he said had failed to act sufficiently in the phone hacking affair, with a new body. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade discussed what this could mean in practice, speculating that the end result would most probably be a body with a new name and staff, but a very similar function to the PCC.

Inclusion in ePresse, the new digital kiosk for French publishers, is not the only change on the horizon for Le Parisien. In light of recent figures of circulation decline, the French regional publication is restructuring its approach to print and diversifying alongside it.

Last Friday, the Amaury Group (owner of Le Parisien) announced it would be investing 30 million euros into the paper. The paper will unveil its redesigned format in 2012, which will be more colorful and with enhanced sections. In addition to the new format, Le Monde

reported that the newspaper would launch a weekly lifestyle magazine next year. In test editions, it included articles on events, do-it-yourself projects, gardening, and education.

Following up on its 2006 report on newspapers' troubles, The Economist published a new 14-page special report on the future of news today.

"Who killed the news?" dominated The Economist's cover five years ago, and the following report was about as bleak as the headline. The report chronicled the industry's loss of advertising revenue, declining circulation, and competition with citizen journalists and bloggers. One article went so far as to claim, "Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but is only a matter of time."

Things seem to be looking up this time around. In this week's special edition, titled "Back to the coffee house", The Economist admits that its last report may have jumped the gun. American and European newspapers still face the same problems, but little by little they are adapting to current circumstances. Reinvention is key to survival.

Larry Kilman, the executive director of Communications and Public affairs for WAN-IFRA, was quoted as saying, "The [news] audience is bigger than ever, if you include all platforms. It's not an audience problem - it's a revenue problem."

The U.S. Agency for International Development's new project is turning to cell phones to disseminate news in an unstable country with a tradition of low literacy.

According to NextGov, the initiative, called Mobile Khabar (meaning mobile news in both Dari and Pashto) is a mobile phone service that aims to provide Afghani subscribers with free customized daily news reports. When the system is running, the reports will stream radio broadcasting from local and foreign radios, as well as newspaper articles read aloud.

The initiative is good news for developing media. Mobile phones have become an integral part of reading and sharing news in the West, and focusing on the mobile to spread news means that more Afghanis will have access to independent news sources regardless of their location.

Much has been said about how cell phones are effectively "crowd-sourcing" journalism, as citizens that witness news can now take pictures, videos, and send tweets to bring attention to an event. The Afghani project is far off from turning Afghanis into ad-hoc journalists - internet access and smart phones, as well as technological know-how would be necessary pre-requisites. However, it is one of the first initiatives geared towards making media relevant for all citizens.

Reuters is stepping up its social media efforts: the news agency named Anthony De Rosa as its new social media editor yesterday. De Rosa is currently a product manager and technologist at Reuters. Poynter published the memo announcing De Rosa's appointment.

As a social media editor, De Rosa's role will consist of integrating social networks, where news often breaks first, into Reuters platforms. He will assist Reuters journalists and editors "use social media tools to monitor news, report news, and find leads," according to the memo. De Rosa has obvious credentials to take up such a role: the New York Times called him "the undisputed King of Tumblr", referring to his top-ranking Tumblr blog, and according to NBC New York he is one of the top 20 people to follow on Twitter.

De Rosa's appointment is in line with latest developments at news organisations, as more and more of them are seeing social media as offering valuable tools for journalists, in addition to having huge potential as a traffic driver. Moreover, latest reports show that social networks are having an ever more integral role in their users' lives, which would make an expansion to the social media field a tempting option for any news outlet.

Since 2006, The New York Times has held its annual "Win a Trip" contest with reporter Nicholas Kristof, offering students (and starting from this year someone 60 or over), the chance to accompany Kristof on a reporting assignment to Africa. Participants apply by submitting either an essay or a video explaining why they should be chosen for the experience.

This is just a small part of the wider attention Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, pays to Africa. His second Pulitzer, won in 2006, was awarded for his coverage of the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Kristof's most recent column appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review on July 1st, and reflected on his latest African adventure within the "Win a Trip" contest. At the same time, and as he points out on his blog, the column was also an attempt to address a broader discontent about the way news media and journalists write about Africa.