Times are tough down under. Embattled traditional media outlets in Australia are being beaten in the struggle for advertising revenue by online media companies.

Where once classified advertisements were rivers of revenue that sustained print titles for almost two centuries, they are now more commonly found at specialist sites that are presenting a serious challenge to newspaper’s position in the advertising market.

According to the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia, 2012 is the first year in which online ad spend in Australia overtook that of newspapers. The dominance of new media companies focused on the sale of classified ads online, in particular Carsales.com, recruitment site SEEK, and real-estate site REA, contributed greatly to the change, which saw the online market receive 27 per cent of the country’s total advertising dollars. Newspapers attracted 24 per cent.

Reuters reports that the shift in advertising dominance from traditional media to online companies is a relatively new phenomenon in Australia. As recently as April the value of traditional media organisations was greater than that of online companies, but in the intervening months the worth of newspaper outlets and television broadcasters plummeted.

The Guardian has announced that Tanya Cordrey has been named to the new role of Chief Digital Officer. She is currently GNM's Director of Digital Development. In the same announcement, the company said David Pemsel, GNM's interim Chief Marketing Officer, has been promoted to the new position of Chief Commercial Officer.

The Huffington Post reports that Se & Hoer, a Danish celebrity weekly magazine, will publish the topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge in a 16-page supplement that is sold with its Thursday edition.

Speaking of Huffington Post, an article on Mashable describes what a smash hit HuffPost Live has been in its first month on the air. To date, "HuffPost Live has aired 12 hours of original video per day, five days a week, with more than 2,000 guests appearing on air," according to the Mashable report.

At the beginning of this week, The Guardian published its 12th annual list of the 100 most powerful people in the media industry. Covering broadcast media, newspapers and magazines, new media, marketing, advertising and PR, the Guardian Media 100 is compiled by a panel of industry insiders who take into account the economic, cultural and political influence individual media figures exert in the UK.

Unsurprisingly, given the size of their audiences and revenues, social media and technology companies dominate the top 10. Google CEO Larry Page takes pole position, reflecting his company’s attempts to move into the social networking market with Google+. Twitter’s Dick Costolo takes second place, while both Sir Jonathan Ive for Apple and Android/ Google’s Andy Rubin (third and sixth place respectively) are feted for the role they played in developing tablet products and changing the way we access information online.

About half of the Chicago Tribune's local editions have been cut since the company suspended its work with Journatic, a supplier of outsourced journalism, according to a report on Poynter by Andrew Beaujon.

"If Africa wants to be taken seriously, it must generate its own content," was a theme of a panel discussion on "Broadband Africa - Opportunities for Innovation and Transformation," part of Africa Rising: The Highway Africa Conference 2012 in Association with the Global Forum for Media Development, which took place this week in Grahamstown, South Africa. While there is a lot of connectivity within Africa, there is not a lot of content being created there, one panel member noted.