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 »

This should be useful Twitter has launched a new account that is dedicated to spotlighting some of the best practices and innovative uses of Twitter by journalists and newsrooms.

Twitter says the account will focus on “innovative Twitter use across all types of news & journalism – not just breaking”. Interesting that it comes in a week when Twitter said that it wasn’t a media company. Read More »

From Friday, The Guardian will begin charging its 280,000 active iPad users £9.99 a month to use its iPad app. It is going to be a big moment for the Guardian, a test of paid content, while it continues to maintain a rich free website.

Since its launch in October The Guardian iPad has been free, by way of a sponsorship deal with Channel 4, but now those three months of free access are up the question is how many of those readers will pay? 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 »

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 »

The Guardian and its journalists have topped a list of the top 50 most influential news tweeters, according to PR agency Portland and Tweetminster, with the BBC coming in second.

The Guardian and its journalists accounted for nine of the top 20 places, but the top spot when to a Sky News journalist. While the Guardian, Telegraph, Financial Times and Independent all features prominently in this news oriented list there is one notable exception that doesn’t: The Times, which seems to suggest this list isn’t quite a far ranging as it needs to be. Read More »

The Associated Press has released new social media guidelines on how staffers should handle re-tweets (tips/guidelines from the Guardian and the BBC are also worth checking). Basically for the AP it comes down to not retweeting anything with an opinion. Doesn’t this slightly defeat the point of retweets or is that just me?

When someone says something that is interesting or controversial you want to share that with your followers. That’s the nature of social media and Twitter particularly. Read More »

Big changes at the Independent today, which last week celebrated the first birthday of its ‘i’ newspaper, as it unveils a new website with an international paywall, which we recently reported was under consideration, as well as a paid for iPad app.

The Independent’s UK site remains free, but users accesing from the US and Canada will have to pay. Read More »

Lots of interesting things coming out of the Guardian today. There’s the opening up of its social news platform nOtice and now a new Twitter based search service that sounds like it could be very useful.

The idea is if you want to find out the latest on some hot topic of news you send a tweet to the @GuardianTagBot service and it will send you the links to its latest coverage. Read More »

Yesterday everyone was very excited about the Guardian’s decision to put its news lists online and ‘open up its news coverage‘, which was a nice turn and gave a little look under the bonnet of the news process at the Guardian. It was another example of how news organisations are becoming more social, collaborative even, allowing their readers to get involved in the news process much earlier.

Later at the Daily Telegraph we saw something else about the “process” as a spat over a story by freelance foreign correspondent Rob Crilly and his news editor exploded on Twitter with the rudest of four letter words, which were then featured on the Telegraph’s website courtesy of its auto Twitter feed. Read More »