The Daily Mail has overtaken The New York Times to become the world's biggest newspaper site, according to data from comScore. 

Buzzfeed reports that in December 2011 Mail Online reached 45.3 million users, compared to 44.8 million reached by the The New York Times.

Mail Online publisher Martin Clarke told Buzzfeed in an interview that growing US audiences and the hiring of deputy editor Katherine Thompson, formerly of the Huffington Post, have helped fuel the Mail's boom in readers. The site has a strong presence in America, with permanent staff in New York and Los Angeles. 

Sometimes a story's too long to be an article, too short to be a book. What can publishers do? Increasingly, the answer has been to publish e-singles. 

The concept has been around for a while. Almost a year ago, the New York Times published an article about the Atavist, an app launched in January 2011 as a platform for long-form stories, enhanced with high-quality photography, videos and audio features. 

Atavist co-founder Evan Ratliff described the gap his project filled in the market: "in the digital realm, there is infinite space, but somehow this hasn't resulted in a flowering of long-form content." Fellow founder Nicholas Thompson added, "the Web is good at creating short and snappy bits of information, but not so much when it comes to long-form, edited, fact-and-spell-checked work"

British tabloid The Daily Mail is broadening its online presence with the introduction of Mail Online India, reports Roy Greenslade in The Guardian today.

The new page is integrated into Mail's UK website, but contains content from Mail Today, a publication launched by the Daily Mail's parent company Daily Mail & General Trust together with the India Today Group in November 2007.

Mail Online India features Mail Today's logo on its banner, but it also reproduces large amounts of content from its British counterpart; the 'Femail' section, for example, is identical on both sites' home pages.

The UK Audit Bureau of Circulation's numbers are out for December, and the news isn't good for Sunday papers. 

Across the board, Sunday newspaper experienced a decline in circulation, the worst hit being the Scotland on Sunday, with a 7.05 % drop. The least affected was The Observer, which saw a 0.03% decline in circulation. 

The ABC numbers are all the more striking because they lead The Guardian to conclude that nearly half of the now-defunct News of the World's buyers have given up purchasing Sunday tabloids altogether. 

According to Guardian journalist Mark Sweney, when the News of the World was closed in July, 30% of its circulation was not absorbed by the paper's rivals, suggesting that its former customers were simply not buying Sunday tabloids any more.