James Mitchell

"Staff at The Times and The Sunday Times have been informed of plans to introduce a paywall to the newspapers’ websites, and given access to a preview of the new paid-for service. It is understood that subscribers to the print version of the newspaper would be granted access to the websites and Sky customers would be able to add a subscription within their membership fees."

"High-definition cameras and web-enabled mobile handsets wielded by ordinary people have become crucial elements of news coverage in places such as Tehran and Rangoon, where what once was unreported is now recorded and rapidly shared with the world. But as shown by the mobile phone film that a passer-by took of Ian Tomlinson – who died of internal bleeding after being attacked by a police officer – at last year's G20 demonstrations in London, those digital technologies have a part to play in news coverage closer to home."

"The public relations news monitor Meltwater, which is still refusing to pay UK newspapers for crawling their websites, has now been blocked from indexing Times Online, the most serious of Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers. The news site, which is due to go behind a paywall this spring and which had already blocked the NewsNow news monitor in January, enacted the block via the standard robots.txt protocol on Tuesday. It means thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won't be able to inform clients when their company is mentioned in the Times."

"There's a heated turf war going on inside the New York Times over the iPad, pitting print die-hards against people focused on the Times' digital future. The outcome will determine pricing for some marquee content on Apple's tablet."

"The bad news for Murdoch is that it truly confounds him — keeps him up at night. It’s a nuisance he can’t shake. It confounded him when he bought it (the original plan was to buy a gaming company, but then he got talked into MySpace), telling people (anyway, he told me) he was in the “stalking business.” Then, his wife Wendi’s interest in the company meant he had to hear about it all the time, which bored him, and, worse, she was constantly traveling in her various positions with MySpace (Murdoch himself was never sure what she did), leaving him at home with the children (quite a reversal in his historical marital role). Perhaps most unnerving were the constant rumors — which he had to embarrassingly discuss with his PR people — that Wendi was having an affair with DeWolfe.

"This new generation of digital magazines, if and when they happen, should regard themselves as home-pages, or bases from which their readers can make excursions into the web. They are somewhere to focus a particular interest, to provide relevant material, and signposts to exploration. They’re also a place to return to later on."