Recently by Leah McBride Mensching

Many news publishing related trends built up speed and began taking hold in 2010, and are worth watching and considering further in 2011.

In no particular order, those trends are:

Coupons and daily deals

Leading the pack in 2010 was Chicago-based Internet coupon service Groupon Inc., which turned down a US$6 billion buyout offer from Google in early December and secured $500 million (of $950 million) at the end of the month.

Publishers around the globe are trying out Groupon-like daily deals as a way to engage readers, and are beginning to see success.

The U.S. government and others will use the latest WikiLeaks release "as reason for secrecy for many years to come," believes Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the Associated Press. It may take some time for the situation to change, but governments will try to plug what leaks they can and "lock things down," she said. She was speaking at the Nieman Lab event "From Watergate to Wikileaks: Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age."

All governments want to keep secrets from the public, she said, sometimes for the right reasons, but sometimes not. "Governments too often stretch the national security rationale well beyond reason," she continued, and there is a lot of information that is 'classified' that has little reason to be so. She pointed out that the US government spends $9 billion a year on keeping information secret. The U.S. is far from being alone in this practice, Carroll said: and threats against journalists for reporting on what the government wants to keep secret is "an all too familiar sad story in too many countries."

For more on this story, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.

Due to increasing spending and more focus on branding, the growth of online display ads are expected to surpass the growth rate of paid search ads in 2014, research from eMarketer has found.

Between 2011 and 2014, the firm estimates that both search and display will see increases greater than the rise in overall online ad spending in the United States, at about 13.9 percent. However, from 2011 and 2014, online display spending is expected to begin growing faster than overall online spending, while the rate of search spending growth falls into third place.

Graph: eMarketer

CNN's new iPad app is completely different than the news network's website, because it was designed specifically for the iPad, and isn't meant to be a tablet-version of the website, Kenneth Estenson, the company's senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com, told Poynter.org's Damon Kiesow.

"With a multi-touch interface, there is no rulebook yet," he said. "The iPad is so new. The initial question was, 'What do I want to touch?'" The design centres on high quality images, because people "want to touch imagery more than words," he explained.

Image: Broadsheet view of CNN's iPad app

Grace Mugabe is suing Zimbabwean newspaper the Standard for US$15 million for reporting on information released by Wikileaks that said she made "tremendous" profits from the sale of illegally mined diamonds, the Guardian reported today.

The defamation suit was brought by the first lady of the country in high court yesterday over an article published Sunday by the Standard, which quoted from the U.S. embassy cable released by Wikileaks. The 2008 cable, sent by former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee, stated that "High-ranking Zimbabwean government officials and well-connected elites are generating millions of dollars in personal income by hiring teams of diggers to hand-extract diamonds," according to SWRadioAfrica.com. The stones are generally referred to as "blood diamonds," because of the human rights abuses associated with their extraction, and the cable specifically named Mrs. Mugabe and the country's central bank governor, Gideon Gono, Aljazeera explained.

Photo of Grace Mugabe: New Zimbabwe

Apple launched its iAd advertising platform today for the iPad, and the bar to entry is US$1 million, paidContent reported. This means marketers must pay at least $1 million to be allowed into the iAd system to begin with.

Marketers must also give "a good deal" of creative control over to Apple, the article stated. "iAds is meant to be an event, something special, at least for now." For example, it may be perfect for advertising a movie, but less so for other products.

Radio audience measurement firm Rajar has found that in the United Kingdom, 8.1 million people - 16 percent of all adults - have downloaded podcasts, MediaGuardian reported today.

The survey also shows that 6.6 million people have listed to the radio on their smartphones, and 44 percent said they listen to a podcast at least once a week. Those who have downloaded a radio app have reached 2.2 million, a 57 percent increase in less than six months. In June, 1.4 million smartphone users said they had downloaded a radio app, Beehivecity noted.

Community newspapers in the United States have a strong readership base, with 73 percent of people saying they read a local newspaper at least once a week, according to the fifth readership survey by the National Newspaper Association, the Arizona City Independent reported.

Seventy-eight percent said they read all more most of their newspaper, and of those who said they get news online, 55 percent said they access their local newspaper's website.

Newspaper publishers around the globe understand their traditional revenue sources will not return to the levels they enjoyed in years past, and they are making the development of new products and new channels their top priorities for more profit, the second annual World News Future & Change Study concludes.

Continual transformation and change is a way of life in the media world, not a one-time process, they acknowledge in the study, conducted by the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers' (WAN-IFRA), in partnership with the Norwegian School of Management (BI) and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) in the United Kingdom.

Thomson Reuters Corp. is launching a new U.S. service today.

Reuters America will directly compete with The Associated Press, focusing on state and regional news and also using information from other sources, such as SportsDirect Inc. for sports, TheWrap.com for entertainment news, and Examiner.com for local news, The Wall Street Journal reported. The news service's first client is Tribune Co., which last year began a trial on using less AP content in order to cut costs.

Image: The Thomson Reuters building in Times Square, photo by The New York Times

Yahoo! is expected to lay off between 650 and 700 people today, or about 5 percent of its worldwide staff, AllThingsDigital reported yesterday.

The layoffs will come mostly from its product division, and will be mostly within the Internet company's U.S. division. A Yahoo employee in its Flickr group just tweeted this afternoon "All I got for Christmas from Yahoo is a pink slip. And hugs from Flickr. And a nice package. Adios, Y! Good luck on your downslide," TechCrunch reported. The tweet has since been deleted.

Image: TechCrunch

The Atlantic is set to bring in a US$1.8 million profit by the end of the year - the first time in more than 10 years it has not lost money, The New York Times reported Sunday.

So how is the 153-year-old U.S. monthly magazine been able to make such a comeback? "We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic," Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, told The Times. "In essence, we brainstormed the question, 'What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?'"