Facebook's $5 billion IPO filing this week has left the world in little doubt about the growing importance of social media in our lives. Now, both adapting to this trend and looking at its power, Reuters has launched a social media hub with a special focus on the interaction between social media and business. 

Social Pulse, as the new hub is called, contains a curated selection of news from across Reuters' social media networks. The top section, titled The Hit List, features the most popular stories shared by people followed by Reuters accounts and Reuters journalists on Twitter. In a blogpost about Social Pulse, Reuters stresses that it follows influential "newsmakers", to bring its readers stories popular with the people who are setting the news agenda. The section is managed through the curation company Percolate, also used by IPG and American Express.

Curation is nothing new, but what makes Social Pulse stand out is the way it combines social media and business analysis. The second section on the new page, powered by "big data" sentiment-tracking company Wise Window, allows readers to compare the sentiment expressed about various firms on social media networks with those companies' stock prices. The companies analysed are sorted into broader industry catagories including Tech, Finance and Healthcare. 

For news publishers, there's no doubt that the digital age has well and truly arrived. eMarketer published a report in January predicting that online advertising spending in the United States will overtake print this year. 

Spending on online ads in the US grew by 23% last year, totaling $32.03 billion, estimates eMarketer. The company, which provides analysis of internet market trends based on its own assessment of ad selling companies' reported revenues as well as on data from other industry sources, predicts that online ad spending will grow another 23.3% this year, to reach $39.5 billion. 

Meanwhile, US print advertising, which totaled an estimated $36 billion in 2011, is expected to drop to $33.8 billion. 

Working with numbers is becoming more important than ever for journalists. 

Vast amounts of data are being collected online, investigative journalism outfits like ProPublica are doing more and more work with large sets of publicly available data, and data visualisations are increasingly becoming a standard part of reporting. At the end of last year, Amy Webb, CEO of Webbmedia, named 'Big Data' as her first prediction of a major tech trend for 2011. 

Tools already exist for journalists to exploit this growth in data. Nieman Lab reported earlier this week on Weave, an open-source internet platform for creating visualizations of "any available data by anyone for any purpose". Another example is Tableau Public, a data visualization tool that was billed by Journalism.co.uk as requiring "no technical ability" and being "easier to use than the wizard options that allow you to create graphs in Excel".

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The Daily celebrates its first birthday today. When News Corp launched its tablet-only daily news publication on February 2, 2011, many in the industry had high hopes. 

"News Corp. is redefining the news experience with The Daily. We think it is terrific and iPad users are really going to embrace it," said Steve Jobs, Apple's late CEO, at the time.

One year on, Josh Sternberg at Digiday has published an article about how The Daily has faired so far. At first, the answer seems to be that The Daily's first year has been bumpier than expected.

"There's been no shortage of critics of The Daily," writes Sternberg, "It's too expensive. It lacks a voice. The technology, at least initially, was wonky. It had several staff shakeups. And most of all, it hasn't proven itself a viable as a standalone business."

The Washington Post is encouraging its own journalists to get more involved in the comment threads on its website. Comments from Post staffers are marked out by "WP staff" insignia, and their involvement may do something to soften the tone of discussion, writes Nieman Lab.

TED, the non-profit group that hosts lectures and posts them online for free, has announced a new approach to its 2013 program: crowd-sourcing. 

In a blogpost published yesterday, the organisation declared that it was starting a "global talent search" for its 2013 program. TED will be holding auditions for new speakers in 14 cities across six continents between April and June this year. 

Possible future TED speakers from Nairobi to Vancouver to Tokyo will be able to apply online two months before the auditions open in their city. Anyone can submit an application, excluding people who have previously spoken for TED or posted talks on TED.com/talks.

In each city, 30 of the best applicants will be invited to give a 3-6 minute talk in English. When all the auditions are over, videos of the speakers will be posted on part of TED's site and members of the public will vote for their favourites. The top 50 will be invited to talk at TED 2013.

The BBC's Community Reporters Scheme, which was launched in London last year, is set to be rolled out in Salford and Glasgow too, reports Journalism.co.uk. The scheme aims to give training to budding journalists at the same time as highlighting local stories in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. 

"So... What are you working on?" 

Now some Guardian journalists are prepared to give us the answer to that question, as yesterday the paper unrolled Newsdesk live, a blog that promises to "bring you the news as we break it, explain how we choose what we report and why - and ask you to get involved."

This new blog from The Guardian's national news team puts the audience at the heart of the news-writing process, asking them to get in touch via comments, emails or Tweets to provide editors with ideas and information to help create stories. 

"No comment".

Business executives had become more and more adept at hiding behind this phrase, argues David Carr of The New York Times in an article published on Sunday. Not only that, but major figures in business are often obscured by "communications" teams that are anything but communicative. But now, suggests Carr, "Twitter has the potential to cut past all that clutter". 

Carr writes that thanks to Twitter "there's a chance to get a glimpse into the thinking of otherwise unapproachable executives, and sometimes even have a real dialogue with them". 

He uses Rupert Murdoch as an example. The News Corp executive joined the microblogging platform at the very end of last year, and has since made the headlines several times with Tweets that Carr calls "devoid of nuance, partisan in the extreme and prone to crankiness, all consistent with the Rupert Murdoch we have come to know". 

Today the European Journalism Centre has published an article about how the new tax, which came into effect at the beginning of this year, has affected Finnish newspapers. 

In a nutshell, it's been tough for journalists. The EJC magazine reports that 100 media workers have already been laid off as a direct consequence of the new tax. 200 more jobs are on the line. 

The tax has been controversial, partly because of the way Finnish politician Kimmo Sasi, who argued for the imposition of the new tax, spoke out against the media: "The members of the press tend to be a bit arrogant. They think: "We can write whatever we want about politicians, and they will have to dance to our music. Luckily the majority of the Parliament is not going to accept this," quotes the EJC. 

The Washington Post announced last Friday that it was launching campaignreads.com, a new section of its site "completely powered by our readers" where it shares a curated selection of Tweets with links to coverage of the US presidential election.

Post Politics wrote that, for the past few weeks, it had been asking readers to share links to their favourite election coverage by tweeting @PostPolitics or with the hashtag #campaignreads. The Post's political team now curates these Tweets using Storify, and publishes them on its new page. 

The initiative has potential benefits for Post journalists and their readers. Firstly it helps the Post "filter the deluge of campaign coverage" by asking its users for selection of the articles they enjoyed the most. Secondly it gives readers prominence by crediting them on the campaignreads.com if the Post uses articles that they've shared.

The Washington Post has launched a new section on its website titled to publish links to the best coverage of the US election. The Post gathers links shared by Twitter users tweeting with its hashtag #campaignreads. 

Facebook hires Bloomberg's Dan Fletcher as its new managing editor, reports Forbes.

The Guardian has published a map, based on the research project How Africa Tweets, showing Twitter usage across the African continent. 

"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country -- while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why." 

Twitter writes that it will withhold access to Tweets in certain countries "if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity". As an example of illegal material it names pro-Nazi content, which is outlawed in France and Germany.