The Los Angeles Times is to become the latest major online newspaper to put up a paywall. It announced its plans at the weekend and says it will begin charging from next week.

Like the unrelated New York Times, the LA Times has opted for a social media friendly metered paywall and plans to charge an initial rate of 99 cents a month before rising after a four week trial. Read More »

Ken Livingstone’s team has launched a new website today as Labour presses its attack on Conservative Boris Johnson and his second job with the Daily Telegraph, which pays him £250,000 a year. Combined with his job as London Mayor earns him £400,000 a year.

The site “chicken feed” site refers to a comment Johnson made in 2009 during an interview for the BBC’s HARDTalk programme (below) where he called his Telegraph salary “chicken feed” despite it being many times what most London voters earn. Read More »

Nicholas Cage would have trouble driving this lot away. Every minute in social media there are millions of interactions taking place –  they happen on Pinterest, Foursquare, Flickr, Tagged, LinkedIn,StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as detailed by this nice infographic here detailing what can happen in a mere 60 seconds in social media.

How many Tweets do you reckon? Enough that if you read them all it would take days to get through them all.  And forget about Facebook with 700,000 messages you could be there for weeks. Read More »

Here’s the second snapshot in our sector-by-sector examination of how UK brands are performing in terms of social media. This chapter sees us move away from casual outdoor fashion that we wrote about last time to look at a different end of the retail spectrum… toy shops.

As every Facebook login shows, proud parents have colonised social media with pictures of their kids. Community portals like Mumsnet and Netmums have become powerhouses capable of influencing social policy. And the blogosphere is bursting with mummy diarists. Read More »

Interesting piece in Ad Age arguing that social media in politics has no real impact on the outcome. It points in part to research saying that “if no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two” as evidence that it wasn’t the social media savvy who got the president elected, but an older population of Democrats and independents who were galvanised.

In the current election it points to Republican social media leader Ron Paul who despite his and social-media prowess has failed to win a single primary and argues that despite the increased “importance of social media in business, there is no solid evidence that it matters in politics”. Read More »