Instead of prompting users to go to the iPad’s Safari browser to read full versions of articles, as it has done to date, Flipboard will now import partner publisher content and lay it out automatically. For these stories, Flipboard formats images, divides them into pages and offers different layouts for portrait and landscape modes.

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[O]ne thing is becoming clear: publishers mostly just want you to look at their content, and are hoping that you will forget all about the Internet and social media and all of those irritating things that get in between you and the consumption of their wonderful content.

via Mathew Ingram, Too Many Magazine Apps Are Still Walled Gardens: Tech News «.

The publisher may be right in the middle of introducing fees for its own online newspapers, but it is putting on ice Rupert Murdoch’s grander ambition of creating a pay-for digital news service comprising content from the entire UK news industry. At the same time, sources familiar with the company’s plans say similar efforts in the U.S. have been put on a slower track, but not being canceled. (more…)

[T]he Times will be creating a “sunrise edition” of its home page—a “fully refreshed” new product rather than an updated version of the previous night’s print edition. Instead of holding big stories for the print paper, Keller said, the Times will publish for “maximum impact,” putting pieces out online in the daytime to compete for immediate attention.

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As the year ended, Matt Idema and Yahoo media boss Jimmy Pitaro devised a test to see if Associated Content and its thousands of freelancers could bolster Yahoo’s local content offerings as much as they thought they could.

Starting in the first quarter of 2010, Yahoo secretly began publishing stories written by Associated Content’s freelancers for users coming to Yahoo.com from computers in Detroit and Cleveland. The stories were of local interest, and the positive reaction from users was immediate; they were clicking like crazy.

via Nicholas Carlson, The Inside Story: How Yahoo Bought Associated Content.

David Brauer seems to be of the opinion that any new paywall should be “robust” and shouldn’t be able to be defeated by means of a plugin (or by using multiple browsers, or by deleting cookies, or various other methods, I suppose). But that’s exactly wrong. The purpose of a paywall isn’t to keep people out, it’s to generate revenue from loyal readers. (more…)