The Financial Times digital application has been removed from the iTunes App Store after Apple revised its policy to ensure that it could obtain 30% of all subscription fees purchased within the store itself.

As MacRumours reports, the company revised its pricing policy in the App Store Review Guidelines to include this paragraph:

"11.14 Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to purchase the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app"

Essentially, this banns leading consumers away from pages inside an application to a company's own independent site, where the customer could purchase subscriptions. If companies did this, Apple wouldn't see any of that subscription money, as the transactions would not go though the Apple App Store.

The Financial Times is not happy with this arrangement.

For a round up of what Middle Eastern publications are making of the battle for Lybia, take a look at The Economist. Some are hailing a bright new future; others anticipate a grapple for resources with the west.

U.S. Spanish language media seems to be resisting the drop in circulation experienced by other U.S. media. The Pew Reseach Centre assesses the situation.

Southern Sudan introduces new media laws to prevent restrictions to journalism.

Can online adverts ever match the power of print publicity? Net News Check outlines the difficulties of offering consumers the same kind of savings power offered by print coupons.

Constant vigilance! Jack Shafer on why all journalists should always keep their eyes peeled for the next opportunity.

Twitter - it 's constantly there to reassure you that the rest of the world exists and that everyone is talking to each other. All the time.

Records in constant communication are being set all the time. The MTV Video Music Awards ceremony played host to the most tweeted about moment of all time, when Beyoncé revealed her baby bump to the world, spawning 8,868 tweets per second. That's fast. That's more than Osama Bin Laden's death

Andy Carvin, a tweeter of legendary calibre, who recently issued 1200 tweets in one weekend, covering the uprising in Libya and the East Coast Earthquake, is merely one example of how journalists are glued to the micro-blogging site.

It's not merely personal choice; it's an industry standard.

When discussing his digital-first strategy, J. X. Paton said at The WAN IFRA International Newsroom Summit "Adding a new person or expense for every new Digital function is just putting more water into a sinking boat. You have to multi-task. And, again, you have to train your people to do so. If they can't learn you have to let them go and hire those who can." By this standard, journalists are expected to have one hand hovering over their smart phone at all times.

Social networks have changed the world of news; in fact, it's hard to imagine journalism without them.

No one could have missed the reaction to Google + arriving on the scene and all the speculation about whether the giant that is Google would change our social media landscape.

As a new Pew Internet survey reveals, 50% of all American adults now use a social network compared to 5% six years ago, so clearly the significance of social media can't be underestimated. However, not all social networks are young, fresh and exciting anymore... So, at a time when the relationship between social media and the public seems to be nearing the end of the honeymoon period and signs of so-called 'social media fatigue' are starting to creep in, Google+ has provided a little something to stoke the fire.

Google+ continues to be a magnet for media attention, but of late the press has been shining the spotlight on it's 'real name policy'. Google effectively wants you to be you in order to use its social network, as Mashable reports.

So what does this mean for journalists? Well it might mean that if you like to keep your professional identity and your personal life separate in the online world, this could be an issue.

'Hurricane' Irene, which eventually turned out to be a tropical storm, was a natural disaster that loved the spotlight. As Howard Kurz of The Daily Beast points out, the fact that a rare hurricane was poised to strike the East Coast base of many major news operations managed to draw news coverage in the US away from the ongoing struggle in Libya in favour of non-stop storm coverage.

There's nothing strange about this: whenever unexpected bad weather strikes a major city, the media is always on high alert providing constant updates for their concerned audience.

Irene, however, is particularly interesting as the coverage, both user-generated and professional, spanned so many platforms and even temporarily altered the business models of several news organisations. Was it a 'hurricane of hype,' asked Agence France-Presse?

In case you had missed it, media is changing.

But you already knew that. You also know that the domain of the traditional journalist is being encroached upon by citizen journalists and amateur bloggers.

What everybody wants to know is: where do we go from here? How does the professional press stay 'professional' when the Internet and mobile technologies allows anyone to become a journalist? Should it even try to?

It would be a glib interpretation of a complex situation to divide the debate in to two camps: those who fully espouse new media and those who view it with a slight air of suspicion, as a source of unreliable information and low quality material.

According to The National Post, it would seem that Quebec's culture minister, Christine St-Pierre, is a member of the latter group, if it exists. Her recent proposals for defining professional journalism state 'the Internet is not yet a source of "original information that respects the journalistic method."' Is it really reasonable to trust 'traditional media' simply because they are traditional? The News of The World was a long running publication, with over a century of journalistic history, but it hardly seemed to support St-Pierre and Payette's so-called 'journalistic method'.

A study shows that there may not be much evidence to support UK government proposals to ban Twitter during times of social unrest, as Twitter was generally used to express reaction, not to incite it.

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO, stating 'I could no longer meet my duties'. This may be related to increasingly frail health. Tim Cook has been named his successor, while Jobs will become Chairman of the Apple Board.

Women in media: Forbes' list of female forces to be reckoned with.

Ghost written opinion pieces: is it acceptable for the rich and famous to pay someone to write their opinions for them?

Russian police are getting ever closer to identifying the murderer of Anna Politikovskaya, the FT reports.

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

What to do when you have been given a plethora of official communiqués and you need to read each one of them to uncover a potential story?

The answer: crowdsource.

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks released a bumper crop of approximately 35,000 diplomatic cables between the U.S. and 20 other embassies and consulates.

The task of wading through them was daunting, yet by outsourcing this task to followers of WikiLeaks on Twitter, who collate their finds under the hash-tag #wlfind, new finds are gradually being broken via the micro-blogging site.

The list of contacts on WikiLeaks' online data base shows messages between the UK, Austria, Brussels, Spain, a host of African nations, Vietnam, Iraq and Lebanon, to name a few.

So what are the advantages to crowd-sourcing tasks like this?

Obviously, systematically sorting through such a database has its challenges: for instance, where to start?

Education, along with health and taxes, is a principal public concern; politicians win elections because of it, and therefore it's vital that newspapers provide good coverage of it.

Both The Guardian and The New York Times have launched crowd-sourcing projects on their websites, which intend to provide readers with information relating to the quality of schools.

As it is GCSE results day in the UK, The Guardian has appealed to teachers on its website to fill in a simple online form, which will then allow them to map the exam results of schools across the country.

Parents in the U.K. are fairly well informed about the exam results produced in their area, as official league tables, which rank local schools based on exam performance, have been widely available and The Department for Education makes performance tables form as far back as 1994 available to the public on its website.

How do you 'Like ' this? Le Monde reports that a German federal state has ruled the 'like' button to be illegal, as Facebook can trace where users have clicked and can use this to amass personal data. Facebook claims that the site does not contravene European Law and that users have complete control of their data.

What the public really thinks about phone hacking: a Frontline Club survey has revealed that the British public believe the practice of phone-hacking was not simply confined to The News of The World.

Disinformation and confusion: The New York Times compares the current mass of contradictory information in Libya to the confusion after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Print v Online: Why old-fashioned paper and print beats digital. Slate investigates.

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

As more and more news sites fly or die based on their page view numbers, there is an understandable interest in the business in services and social networks that drive traffic to news websites. So when StumbleUpon's founder Garrett Camp claimed that his site drives more than half of all social media referral traffic in the US, it was expectable that the announcement made waves in the web news world.

Although those numbers were plausibly contested by Forbes's Jeff Bercovici, there is no denying of the fact that StumbleUpon, a service that helps users discover web pages based on their interests and other users' recommendations, is becoming an important player in the web's link economy and one that web publishers shouldn't overlook.