"The collective intelligence of the newsroom is something we rarely exploit efficiently," writes Gavin Sheridan, Innovation Director of Storyful in a blog post where he discusses the concept of newsrooms as intelligence agencies.

On the Ebyline Blog, Susan Johnston reports on the acceleration of paywalls at US newspapers based on the latest data from the Newspaper Association of America.

The Guardian reports that Twitter has suspended the account of Guy Adams, a journalist for the UK's Independent, who was critical of Olympics coverage by NBC.

"At the Financial Times, we recognized early on that the continued success of our business depended on our ability to adapt to changing reader habits," writes Rob Grimshaw of the FT in an article about "publishing in the age of social media" on The Economist Group's website.

"The biggest media event in history," might well be shaping up into "the biggest circulation war for decades," according to a report from the Guardian, which highlights the extensive efforts by the British press regarding Olympics coverage.

Offices of the Mexican newspaper El Norte near Monterrey have been attacked three times in less than a month. In the most recent attack, on Sunday, armed and masked men broke into the offices and started a fire using gasoline, according to a report from The Telegraph.

Brazilian newspapers are reporting growth in average daily circulation as well as advertising revenue, according to data from the Circulation Verification Institute (IVC) and published on news.com.au.

Digital subscribers to the Financial Times have surpassed the number of print subscribers and the company says digital revenue now makes up half of the group's overall revenue, reports Ingrid Lunden on TechCrunch.

The Guardian is offering its website readers the opportunity to hide Olympics coverage on the site with the click of a "show Olympics/hide Olympics" button, writes Rachel McAthy on journalism.co.uk. The website used a similar button for readers to opt out of Royal Wedding coverage last year, McAthy notes.

The owner of the New Orleans Saints football team, Tom Benson, is part of a group that is expressing interest in buying the New Orleans Times-Picayune, writes Andrew Beaujon on Poynter. In a separate development, Beaujon notes that a US Senator from Louisana, David Vitter, is urging Advance Publications and its owner, Steven Newhouse, to sell the paper.

The first blow came on Monday, when the estate of the late billionaire Sidney Harman, which co-owns the Newsweek Daily Beast Co with IAC/Interactive Corp, officially announced that it would no longer be investing in the loss-making venture.

The second landed yesterday, when IAC’s Chairman Barry Diller let slip during a quarterly earnings call that “the transition to online from hard print will take place,” ostensibly giving this fall or sometime next year as the point by which the company would have come up with a plan to bury the 79-year-old weekly print magazine, transforming it into a web-only presence.

Naturally, this drove the Twittisphere into a frenzy, with some commentators more bereaved by the alleged news than others:

In the wake of Diller’s comments, Tina Brown, Editor in Chief of Newsweek and its digital bedfellow The Daily Beast, conducted damage control in the form of an email to all Newsweek Daily Beast Employees yesterday with the subject line “Scaremongering.” The email, obtained by Politico, begins: 

One year and one day after the News of the World published its last-ever issue, two British journalists were arrested on suspicion of alleged payments to public officials.

That is, two more British journalists; the Daily Star Sunday’s Deputy News Editor Tom Savage and the Sunday Mirror’s crime correspondent Justin Penrose brought the total number of journalists Scotland Yard had arrested in connection with phone hacking, computer misuse and corrupt payments to 34, reported the BBC.

Notably, Savage and Penrose were the second and third journalists to be arrested who had not been employed at publications owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. A week prior, former Mirror employee Greig Box Turnbull had become the first.

These arrests, which took place on July 11, demonstrated the broadening scope of an investigation that began with the discovery of phone hacking at the News of the World, and has spread over the past year beyond voicemail interception and the Murdoch empire to all manners of misconduct in every corner of the British press and police force.

As baby boomers hit their 60s, that stats are beginning to skew in interesting ways, For example, NewMedia TrendWatch expect that "the fastest growth among tablet users as a whole will come in the under-12 and 65-and-older age groups." As this latter, older age group migrates to tablets, the publishing industry needs to ensure that the product remains attractive.

The technology itself will continue to evolve and most likely become simpler. For example, Japan's biggest mobile phone comany DoCoMo is focused on building in speech recognition for older people, working in a similar way to Siri. In a similar vein, Fujitsu recently launched an Android smartphone, the Raku Raku, with an interface specifically re-invented for older users.

But how do we design content for older users?

There is a clichéd assumption that older readers are looking for simplicity: Fewer photos, simpler graphics, easy to read fonts. The satirical website The Onion plays up to this by imagining a version of Time Magazine 'for adults' - instead of the colourful and accessible version on the newsstands today. 

It is a truth near-universally acknowledged, that a news organisation in possession of a reputable but costly print heritage must be in want of an effective online video strategy.

After all, audience eyes and advertising dollars are increasingly gravitating toward YouTube – last month in the U.S. more than 180 million people watched 33 billion videos, according to the comScore’s Online Video Rankings, and video advertising had its best month on record, with U.S. Internet users watching 11 billion video ads.

The newsroom of Le Journal de Montréal, the largest-circulation French-language newspaper in North America, has a distinctive feature: it is practically devoid of journalists.

This is not because Québecor Media Inc, the tabloid’s parent company and one of Canada’s largest media conglomerates, has locked them outside of the building, as it did on January 24, 2009, causing 253 of the tabloid’s unionised staff to picket outside for two years, in what became the longest media labour dispute in Canadian history; rather, it is part of the company’s latest modernization strategy.

“The news isn’t [in the newsroom], it is outside with people. This is where my journalists are,” Le Journal de Montréal's Editor in Chief Dany Doucet reportedly said earlier this year in an interview with Le ProjetJ, an industry news site sponsored by the Canadian Journalism Foundation. “They come here when they have something specific to do in the office.”

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (pictured) was the first female elected to lead an African state, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Now, she has committed to repealing criminal defamation, and to advancing freedom of expression across the African continent.

On Saturday July 21, Sirleaf joined South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger in endorsing the Declaration of Table Mountain, an initiative by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) that aims for the continent-wide abolishment of criminal defamation and insult laws, and the promotion of press freedom to a higher position on the pan-African agenda.

“We are signing the Declaration of Table Mountain in order to underscore our message loud and clear, to advance a free press and freedom of expression, not just in Liberia but the entire continent of Africa,” President Sirleaf said at a signing ceremony in Monrovia on Saturday.

Adopted at the World Newspaper Congress in Cape Town in 2007, the Declaration of Table Mountain has been described by WAN-IFRA's Director of Press Freedom Alison Meston as "an earnest appeal to all Africans, particularly those in power, to recognise that the political and economic progress they seek flourishes in a climate where the press is free and independent of governmental, political or economic control."

The smartphone has become the latest hope for news outlets struggling to fight falling print revenue.

The Star, Malaysia’s most read English daily, recently introduced the iSnap, a feature that brings the “newspaper to life” using augmented reality technology and two major Australian publishers, Fairfax and News Limited have both launched new smartphone enhancements in the past month.

Over at The Star, iSnap sprang from an internal challenge thrown to the New Media Department and to the paper’s technology partner, Knorex Pte Ltd of Singapore. Summoned by the owners to find new ways to enhance the flagship publication, both teams started an intense brainstorming session that eventually triggered the iSnap concept.

Hatched in the same laboratory as Siri, the voice-based assistant acquired by Apple, Trapit is a personalized search and discovery engine that runs on the premise that your love for your friends may not always extend to their taste in reading material.

“Personalization has become nothing more than a buzzword,” said Hank Nothhaft Jr, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Trapit, which has been on the web since November, and unveiled its free iPad app today. “Personalization should be about you, the individual, and your unique tastes and interests, not about what your friends are buzzing about on Facebook and Twitter.”

Compared with other “personalized” news aggregators such as Flipboard, Trapit takes a distinctly antisocial approach to content discovery. Its goal is to capture the rich, long-tail content that is burrowing in hidden niches of the “deep web,” and serve it to you exactly as you like it, based on a thorough, algorithmic understanding your appetite (that we will get to in a moment).

Anti-social media