The Washington Post announced on 1 August that it has launched a new platform for crowdsourcing. The Post describes “Crowd Sourced” as a "special feature that allows Post journalists to ask questions about today’s concerns and begin a conversation about these issues. Users will be able to answer those questions and vote for the ideas they value most, so the most popular responses are surfaced on the page."

A new wave of news syndication is developing according to Ken Doctor in his latest newsonomics post on Nieman Journalism Lab. "It’s worth paying attention to, because it tells us a lot about how the digital news world is developing," he writes.

Laura Hazard Owen on PaidContent.org reports on the latest paywall trends from US newspapers according to data from the Newspaper Association of America. Owen notes that 87 percent of the 156 US newspapers studied are going with the metered approach, with an average of 11.2 articles being freely available before the viewer is asked to pay.

At 14, Jacob Arnott is likely the youngest journalist to have a press pass for the Olympics. He discusses how he sees the future of news with Markham Nolan, Managing Editor of Storyful, on the Storyful blog.

And Jim Romenesko reports on his blog of an attempt in the US to keep readers of a New Jersey weekly from reading about "a town commissioner and a payroll problem"by buying up as many copies of The Retrospect as they could and then dumping them. However, Romenesko writes, the attempt failed because the paper's publisher says all but 500 of the 5,500 copies of the newspaper are sold by subscription.