“On June first, six of us were fired from GOOD magazine,” begins the promotional video.

Remember that story?

Well, the six out-of-work journalists and designers, plus two of their colleagues who later quit, are not lamenting GOOD times past; rather, they are looking ahead to Tomorrow: a one-off dream magazine and website, to be released this fall. To finance the idea, they began fundraising this week on Kickstarter.

Here is how that went:

Within five hours they had met their goal of $15,000.

Four days later they had raised more than $27,528.

The average backer pledged $27.55.

A bit of context: Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing crowdfunding site that allows anyone to pitch an idea to the Internet at large, and hope that like-minded people will volunteer to reach into their pockets.

Digital content production start-up Contently has launched the free version of its editorial management platform today.

Born in Manhattan in December 2010 to childhood friends and self-professed “internet dorks” Shane Snow and Joe Coleman with co-founder Dave Goldberg, Contently is an online matchmaker that connects experienced freelancers seeking a regular paycheck with publishers and companies seeking high-quality writing. It is also a digital Virgil that guides all parties through the editorial obstacle course, from pitch to publication and payment.

While access to the Contently Network of 3,500 hand-selected freelance journalists and bloggers remains a paid service (known as Platform Plus), Contently has opened up its cloud-based workflow organizer to anyone wishing to produce high-quality written content. This includes a colour-coded assignment calendar, a Facebook-like messaging system for writers and editors, and a Google docs-like text editor that allows people to collaborate on stories.

“Software like this wants to be free,” says Snow (pictured) on the phone from New York. “We developed it, so we may as well share it.”

With advances in technology come new challenges for keeping journalistic sources safe.  MediaShift offers a list of tools from Jillian C. York.

Has the legacy of Jayson Blair been forgotten already? An intern at the Wall Street Journal has been fired for fabricating sources. Andrew Beaujon reports for Poynter.

“New media companies that will succeed are founded by two kinds of people: technologists, and media people who think like technologists,” argues Christopher Mims for MIT’s Technology Review.

The BBC will soon redefine the scope of BBC Worldwide, its international commercial arm, due to growing internal friction surrounding online strategy, paidContent reports.

The bad news is piling up for Australia’s Fairfax Media. Yesterday, a week after the announcement of sweeping changes including 1,900 job cuts, the publisher saw its three top editors resign. Today, billionaire Gina Rinehart threatened to dump the nearly 19% stake in the company she acquired last Monday if she is not offered three seats on the board of directors “without unsuitable conditions.”

A video of several senior Fairfax Media journalists speaking about the indispensability of editorial independence has gone viral on Twitter, amidst widespread speculation that the condition Reinhart finds most objectionable is the requirement that board members sign the company’s charter of independence – a pledge that prevents the board from intervening editorially in the newspapers, and from hiring or firing staff.

An email from Peter Horrocks (pictured), the director of BBC World News Ltd. to the division’s 2,400 editorial and non-editorial employees asking them to consider, as their job appraisals approach, how they can help the organization increase its income has been leaked to British newspapers, raising concerns about whether financial pressures are affecting the public broadcaster’s journalistic standards.

The email, as reproduced by the Independent, gives staff four categories of Global News objectives for 2012/13: impact, income, innovation and integration. Predictably, it is the second "i" that is causing problems: the memo, signed with an informal "Peter," asks that BBC employees, including journalists, “exploit new commercial opportunities; maximize the value we create with our journalism.”

"Let us know if you have any ideas on how we can strengthen our commercial focus and grow income,” the email continued, highlighting the fact that “these objectives apply to all parts of Global News: editorial and non-editorial.”

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch an app from a specific publisher, according to a new survey from the Online Publishers Association. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list, according to Read Write Web.

Flipboard has now officially launched on all Android devices and integrated Google+ and YouTube, reports TechCrunch.

The Guardian was crowned "website of the year" and took home four other prizes at the 2012 Online Media Awards last night, the newspaper proudly reports. The Huffington Post and MailOnline were also honoured.

Twenty years after the first UN Earth Summit in 1992, the world’s leaders have once again descended upon Rio de Janeiro to talk about the planet. At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, more commonly referred to as Rio+20, they are slated to spend three days (June 20-22) deciding how to address the interrelated evils of poverty, hunger, energy shortages and environmental degradation. Although it is the largest event ever organized by the UN, as Valentine Pasquesoone from French newspaper Le Monde pointed out yesterday, the media's coverage of the high-level meeting has been permeated with a sense of cynicism that seems to hang over the Earth Summit like a cloud of smog.

If you are asked to imagine the founder of a social network, someone like Mark Zuckerberg might be the first thing to come to mind – the kind of person who starts the project in his dorm room and wears a hoodie to investor meetings.

But over the past couple days, a new social network founder has surfaced: the politician.

Yesterday UK MP Louise Mensch launched Menshn.com, a social network currently only available in the US, which mimics Twitter but allows users to discuss issues by topic.

On the same day, the Guardian reported that the Kremlin is preparing to create a Russian social network to rival Facebook

It goes without saying that these are very different ventures, created for very different reasons.

Yesterday, Jim Romenesko busted Jonah Lehrer, who was just hired by the New Yorker, for plagiarizing himself repeatedly at NewYorker.com, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and in his 2009 book, How We Decide. New York Magazine's Joe Coscarelli looks into it.

Comment moderators work with algorithms to police pages and shied users from content that is obscene, racist, or otherwise offensive. As the web gets more social and the shouts grow louder, their jobs become more stressful. Charlie Warzel reports for AdWeek. First comment below the piece? “Great article really enjoyed reading.”

British Member of Parliament Louise Mensch has launched a US-only social network and potential Twitter rival, Menshn.com (reportedly a play on the word “mention,” not on her name) that allows you to debate by subject. The Guardian reports.

Meet the 25 most dangerous people in financial media (in a good way), according to the Huffington Post.

No longer lone wolves with lenses, photojournalists are increasingly traveling in packs, writes James Estrin for The New York Times' Lens Blog.

The “Surface” - Microsoft's tablet – was introduced yesterday, reports The New York Times; Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff evaluates.

British journalists not covered by the Press Complaints Commission could lose their right to press cards, reports the Guardian.

Regional UK newspaper publisher Johnston Press announces more job cuts in Yorkshire and the Midlands, reports Andrew Pugh of PressGazette.

This summer’s London Olympics are set to be a time of intense competition – and not just for the athletes involved in the sporting events. Yesterday, Facebook unveiled “Explore London 2012:” its new portal for this summer’s Olympic Games, suggesting that traditional media outlets may be facing increasing competition from social media in their coverage of this year’s Olympics.

Explore London 2012, which Reuters reports took 18 months to develop, is a gateway to other Facebook pages, relating to individual athletes, country teams and sporting events. Users who like the main portal will also see updates from the Olympics in their newsfeeds, and those who like individual pages will also be able to see their posts and pictures from the Games. The whole process allows fans and athletes to communicate directly though posts and comments, rather that working through the medium of a news organisation.

Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch writes that the link between the Games and Facebook is “not exclusive”. The Games will also have a branded Twitter page (something we have already seen for NASCAR) a portal on Google+ and partnerships with Foursquare, Tumblr and Instragram.