Newsrooms from Montreal to Denver are editing out their copy desks to keep up with digital’s dual imperative: tight deadlines and tighter budgets.

Monday’s announcement by Postmedia Network means that dozens of copy editing jobs will be axed across Canada in coming weeks; Twitter speculation has it that 23 editors will be let go at the Montreal Gazette alone, reports the Huffington Post Canada.

Yesterday, Postmedia's the National Post offered a warning of the perils of doing away with copy editors when it mistakenly published a crossword puzzle that had already been filled in, revealed Poynter.

“Citizen Media is the new form of a newswire, often quicker than anything else,” said Riyaad Minty, Al Jazeera’s head of social media, in an email exchange with WAN-IFRA earlier this year.

This may be true, but dealing with content from the Internet requires high standards of authentication, and sometimes even big players mess up. During the past week, the BBC has become a case in point. It has made two mistakes with sourcing its images – one serious, one merely embarrassing.

The major error came when the BBC mistakenly used an image taken in Iraq in 2003 to accompany an online story about the recent massacre in Houla, Syria. As Poynter reports, the caption to the photo, shown on the BBC’s website, read, “this image – which cannot be independently verified – is believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial.” The picture was credited to an anonymous “Activist.”

Sympathy mingled with ire on Twitter yesterday as Canadians reacted to a fresh set of cuts announced by Postmedia Network, the country’s largest newspaper chain.

In a memo from CEO Paul Godfrey to employees released Monday afternoon, the company declared plans to shut down the Sunday editions of three urban dailies — the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald — to stop printing its country-wide title, the National Post, on Mondays for the fourth summer in a row (a tactic that Godfrey hinted in an interview with rival national daily The Globe and Mail might be extended throughout the year) and to cease publication on public holidays.

Journalists across the country are grimly waiting to be hit by a renewed surge of layoffs, coming less than a month after the company slashed 25 of 58 posts in its Postmedia News division. “Some roles across our operations will be eliminated,” confirmed Monday’s memo. The Globe and Mail reported that internal memos from the company's Ottawa and Montreal newsrooms indicated that each would lose approximately around 20% of their journalists, but that the total number was yet unknown.

New Orleans is about to become the most prominent American city without a daily printed newspaper.

This fall, the Times-Picayune, a 175-year-old New Orleans institution known for its Pulitzer-decorated coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, will begin printing its paper edition only three times a week, on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

The plan, which is to be accompanied by staff cuts and a stronger emphasis on online coverage, was announced yesterday by Advance Publications, the company behind the Times-Picayune, which is owned by the Newhouse family. Reasons for the restructuring include “tremendous challenges in terms of both revenue and the 24-hour news cycle,” Steven Newhouse, Chairman of advance.net, Advance Publication’s digital arm, told The New York Times.

The Newhouse family's is the last major newspaper company to have kept its digital business separate from its print business, noted news industry analyst Ken Doctor on Newsonomics. As part of the planned online expansion, the Times-Picayune and NOLA.com, its website, will be remodeled into a new company, the NOLA Media Group.

Argentina’s La Nación has stepped up its data strategy, pairing its reporters with programmers to mine for original stories in mountains of raw information, and to create unique data visualizations. Antonio Jiménez from the Nieman Journalism Labdescribes how the Buenos Aires-based daily built up its data squad.

A “radically simplified” version of WordPress is in the works, revealed the platform’s founder Matt Mullenweg at yesterday's paidContent conference. WordPress's flexibility is such that its system is reported to be used for one in eight websites. The new interface promises to be less complicated, and better-suited to smartphones.

Bittersweet news in Daily Mail & General Trust’s latest financial results: overall profits are down, as are print revenues, but digital earnings have seen a heartening jump. Mark Sweney reports and Roy Greenslade comments.

Magazine publisher Future PLC, which puts out publications such as Total Film, Classic Rock, released its interim financial results yesterday, and revealed that it has seen a 48% rise in digital revenues in the UK in the six months leading up to March 31, partly thanks to the boost it has received from Apple’s Newsstand. But although its digital income was up 37% over this period, losses in print meant that the company’s overall revenue still dropped 4%.

In its financial report, Future strongly pushes its success on the iPad. Since the Newsstand was launched in October last year Future has made sales on the platform with more that £3 million. It has sold more than 830,000 copies of its magazines through Newsstand, with 45% of those sales coming being subscriptions. Encouragingly, the Future writes that 90% of subscribers are new customers.

Future’s CEO Mark Wood comments in the report that “Future is seizing the opportunities offered by new platforms and channels to reach new audiences and grow a global digital business.” He states that, “on Apple's iPad, Future is one of the world's leading digital publishers in sales volumes and number of titles. That is a sign of how far we have come in a very short time."

NPR announced yesterday that has it hired the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Boyer to direct a new team, dedicated to building news applications. NPR has produced news apps previously, such as this interactive look at the science of “Fracking” to extract gas, and this map of air-polluting facilities in the US. However, the staff who have worked on these types of projects haven’t been coordinated in a single department, and Boyer’s appointment will bring them together.

Mark Stencel, NPR’s Managing Editor for digital news, who will be in charge of Boyer and his team, tells Poynter; “what I’m hoping is that, by taking these positions and putting them together as a team, we’ll be able to do a higher level of [work] than we’ve been able to do with scattered design, database and development resources.”

Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at Knight Foundation, has criticised the state of journalism education in the US, reports Steve Myers at Poynter. Newton argues that most journalism teaching centers had been slow to adapt to changes in the news industry and he suggests that, it should be reformed to allow more input from journalism professionals as well as academics.

The New York Times reports that Pakistani authorities blocked access to Twitter on Sunday, after accusing the social network of promoting a cartoon contest on Facebook to post images of the prophet Mohammed. Twitter access was restored around 10pm Sunday evening, notes the article, at which time “It remained unclear — and unlikely — that Twitter had agreed to the demands of the Pakistani government”.

WikiLeaks Tweeted today that the organisation is preparing to file suit against the US military over the case of Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of having leaked a massive number of classified documents to the whistleblowing organisation.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reports that a journalist has been kidnapped by three armed men in the northeastern Mexican state of Sonora. Marcos Ávila covers crime for the paper El Regional de Sonora.

The European Journalism Centre has posted a video interview with Dimitri Muratov, Editor-in-Chief of the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, about social media’s role in investigative journalism.

Paul Egglestone, digital coordinator at the University of Central Lancashire's School of Journalism, writes in a blog post for the BBC College of Journalism that his department is developing a new platform for community news, which fuses newsprint and digital technology.

Press Gazette reports that Johnston Press is preparing to switch two of its broadsheet weeklies to tabloid format later this month.

For more industry news, please see WAN-IFRA's Executive News Service.

Financially speaking, this seems to have been a mixed week for the LA Times. On the one hand, Fishbowl LA reported on Tuesday that the LA Times Magazine, which has been running for almost three years in its current form, will shut down next month due to a tough market. On the other, the LA Times announced this Thursday that it has received $1m of funding from the Ford Foundation to strengthen its reporting of beats including immigration, minority communities and Brazil.

First to the bad news. Fishbowl LA quotes the editor of the LA Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who attributes the closure to a lack of funds. “I think it’s fair to say there were revenue issues,” says Clare, “it’s still a tough economic climate, especially for print. I don’t think they got rid of us because they don’t like us.” Fishbowl LA writes that the monthly magazine’s seven staff will be laid off, and there’s “no indication” that jobs in other parts of the newsroom will be made available to them. “They’re contracting in the newsroom too. There’s nowhere to absorb us,” says Clare, quoted in the article.

Gawker Media’s director of editorial operations Scott Kidder was not impressed when Adweek’s website prompted him to share a story before he had read it. Is there anything more desperate a publisher can do? Gross,” he wrote on his blog. But Nieman Lab now explains that this request to share the story was the result of a bug with Google Consumer Surveys, rather than a policy by AdWeek.

Nieman Lab also reports that MTV has partnered with a group of news organisations to create a news game, intended to interest young people in the upcoming US presidential elections. MTV has launched a beta version of the game, named Fantasy Election ’12, with the help of a grant from Knight Foundation, says the article.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple compares the way that different news outlets retracted a bogus story about a jilted dentist in Poland pulling out her ex-boyfriend’s teeth. He ranks the results from most to least transparent.