GigaOM has strengthen its position in the technology news market, against rivals such as Techcrunch, having agreed to buy paidContent publisher, ContentNext Media, from Guardian News & Media for an undisclosed sum.

GigaOM picsk up the main paidContent website, paidContent:UK, and its events business as well as mocoNews.net and contentSutra.com. Read More »

The New York Times has given an update on its paywall and overall digital subscription numbers with the number of digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of paper, and the International Herald Tribune, hitting 390,000 at the end of the fourth quarter. That’s up 20%, or by almost 70,000, since the end of the third quarter of 2011.

Including the Boston Globe the New York Times had a total of 406,000 paid digital subscriptions. Read More »

Facebook has released some intersting stats on its Open Graph features for media partners, which include Yahoo! News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily,  that it announced at f8. We already know that Facebook is a major driver of news traffic with twice as many getting their news via Facebook than any of social network, but the amount of traffic it is drving on a daily basis is striking.

The Guardian is picking up around one million pageviews a day while the Washington Post is getting 3.5 million monthly readers for its social reader app. The Independent has in excess of one million monthly active users are connecting their Facebook accounts and Yahoo News has seen a 600% increase in traffic. Read More »

This is really pretty cool. CNN has launched a great Twitter data visualization tool called ‘Ecosphere’ in support of the COP17 climate change conference in Durban, which starts this week.

The site picks up every tweet tagged with the #COP17 hashtag and uses them to stimulate growth in a plant or tree in the Ecosphere that represents a certain topic, such as sustainability. Read More »

The Guardian has put its PaidContent website up for sale three years after it bought the New York-based digital news site with a price tag of $20m although this is not a figure the Guardian has confirmed.

The Guardian says that while it is early days it already has several expressions of interest from potential buyers. Read More »

A really interesting discussion arose recently about a memo sent to journalists working on a group of newspapers just outside Detroit of what was expected of them in the age of digital journalism and social media. The memo details an extraordinary list of requirements that is well beyond being achievable or even desirable for most news stories or pieces of content.

However, it is what some are being asked to achieve as their editors and publishers ask for too much, without putting in place the resources needed to make it happen, to the detriment of the most of important thing which is the story. Read More »

CNN has unveiled a major relaunched of its user generated news site CNN iReport five years after it launched with changes making it make more like a social network.

The subsequent growth of social media since CNN iReport debuted in 2006 has changed citizen journalism greatly and CNN wants to make its user generated news proejct fit for the social age and create what it is calling a “social network for news”. Read More »

News, views and reviews now travel at incredible velocity online. This video reviews how social news can have a profound effect on anyone because the public has already made up its mind on the issue before you’ve even responded to it.

Think England football captain John Terry, the claimed cyber-lynching of a US Presidential candidate, the BlackBerry outage? Read More »

Yesterday, I blogged on how The New York Times paywall was working as its digital subscriber numbers grow.

Today the Financial Times has issued an update on how its paywall is going from strength to strength and has broken through a significant barrier. Read More »

BBC.com is launching three new editions of its site for Asia, India and Australia/New Zealand.

The sites are aimed at delivering localised and bespoke news coverage to audiences in those regions. Read More »