News Corporation has confirmed that over the next year it will separate its publishing and entertainment companies, after rumours of an impending split began circulating earlier this week. In a memo addressed to staff Rupert Murdoch assures his employees that the decision will see News Corp. separate into “two global leaders in their own right […] as opposed to merely one.”

The new media and entertainment company will include many of News Corp.’s most lucrative interests, such as the broadcasters BskyB, Sky Italia, and Fox Broadcasting, as well as the hugely successful 20th Century Fox Film. Whilst there is little doubt that these businesses will continue to flourish, the same cannot be said of the soon-to-be-annexed newspaper titles. Debate is raging over whether removing the safety-net of profits generated by the entertainment businesses will see the company’s newspapers forced to shape-up, or if the measure will ultimately lead to widespread cost-cutting and titles being sold-off or even closed.

The Chicago Tribune has become one of the latest major newspapers in the US to announce plans to introduce a paywall on its online site, behind which it will place “premium” content including in-depth reports and analysis, columnists and reviews.

At first glance, this may seem little different to action taken by various other news titles that have sought to maintain or increase revenue at a time when print subscriptions are diminishing. However, the Chicago Tribune is attempting to breathe new life into the process by offering its readers the opportunity to read selected articles from Forbes and The Economist as part of its new premium package. The announcement of a partnership between these three titles certainly seems to prove that Bill Adee (vice president for digital development and operations at the Chicago Tribune) and his team understand the need to offer something more than access to their usual articles and reviews in order to justify charging readers for content that was previously free to view online.

RealWire has launched a new tool for "curating the media on Twitter." Lissted, which allows you to search for journalists and bloggers and monitor the media on Twitter, already has a database of over 10,000 journalists, and media professionals can request to be listed by filling out a form and linking their Twitter accounts. The Next Web reports.

A Dutch start-up is developing a Farmville-like Facebook game, NewsGame, that will generate original reporting (and pay for it), reports the Nieman Lab.

The late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid’s death raises questions of how to keep journalists safe in war zones. Steve Myers from Poynter reports.

Early on Tuesday morning rumours began to circulate of a possible restructuring within Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which would see the company separate its entertainment businesses from its smaller section of publishing titles. The rumours are generally seen as credible, having been first published in the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal. Though the company’s representatives are so far refusing to confirm or deny reports outright, BBC Business editor Robert Preston has been told by a News Corps insider that the company has “nothing to add to [the] WSJ piece”.

The idea of dividing News Corp into two separate organisations is not a new one, having first been suggested several years ago, but until now Murdoch had always rejected such a move. The media mogul seems to have a sentimental attachment to newspapers, that until the 1980s were the nucleus of News Corporation. However, the recent scandals that have engulfed Murdoch-owned titles such as the former News of the World have led shareholders to see splitting the company as an ideal way to protect the company’s film and television interests, including the Fox Broadcasting Network and British Sky Broadcasting, from the problems besieging the company’s UK newspaper titles.

In the wake of the events that lead to the on-going Leveson inquiry into press practices, one news organisation is attempting to prove that investigative journalism can be both ethical and capable of generating a profit. Conceived by Mark Watts, current Editor-in-Chief, PR executive Tim Pendry and media finance specialist David Baxter, Exaronews.com is a subscription-based site that aims to eschew the “churnalism” that it claims dominates mainstream media outlets in favour of the rigorous investigative practices used by journalists of old. In the relatively short amount of time that has passed since the site’s launch in October 2011, Exaro has uncovered numerous scandals, including the widespread tax avoidance practiced by civil servants, which have subsequently been picked up by larger titles, including the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail.

On the eve of the second round of legislative elections in France, and two weeks before the end of his tenure, the editor-in-chief for the French division of the Agence France Presse (AFP) news agency announced his defection to a German-brewed rival-in-the-making, reported French newspaper Le Monde.

Due to step down as editor-in-chief for France and take up another position within the agency at the end of the month, Jean-Luc Testault revealed his plans on Friday to leave AFP for a new French competitor being formed by Germany’s DAPD.

Germany’s second-largest news agency, DAPD has been building up a presence in France over the past year, and is allegedly seeking to launch a French generalist, multimedia news agency under the name Sipa News in October, that would compete directly with AFP, according to Le Monde.

Founded upon the German branch of the US news agency Associated Press (AP) and a former East German agency, and owned by businessmen Martin Vorderwülbecke and Peter Löw, DAPD began its French shopping spree with the purchase of Sipa Presse, a French photo agency, in July 2011.

"Fairfax of the Future"

• 1,900 jobs to be cut over the next 3 years
• 300 jobs to be shed in Metro division over 2-3 months
• 2 Metro dailies to shrink to tabloid size on March 4, 2013
• Digital paywalls to be introduced in 2013
• 2 printing presses to be shut down by June 2014
• Expected annual savings of $235 million by 2015

“Fairfax is today announcing fundamental changes to the way we do business,” reads the memo that one of Australia’s largest media companies lodged with the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on Monday, sending shockwaves through the press.

The changes, which include the elimination of 1,900 jobs over the next three years, are expected to reduce costs by $235 million over the same period, and to provide Fairfax with the flexibility to shift toward a “digital-only model if that is what is required in the future,” says the document, entitled “Fairfax of the Future.”

Time Inc., the largest magazine company in the United States, has stopped resisting Apple. Striking a deal similar to that signed by its major competitors a year ago, the Time Warner-owned publisher agreed on Wednesday to sell subscriptions to all 20 of its titles, which include high-circulation weeklies such as Time, People and Sports Illustrated, through the Newsstand section of Apple’s iOS App Store.

The decision represents a considerable change of heart for a publisher that was “once the magazine industry’s most ardent opponent of selling subscriptions through Apple,” according to Amy Chozick of the New York Times.

Until now, Time Inc.’s readers have only been able to access single issues of the iPad editions of its magazines through the Newsstand app, with print subscribers alone receiving regular automatic uploads.

Time Inc.’s recalcitrance toward Apple since the launch of Newsstand last fall was motivated in part by the hard bargain that the technology giant drives with publishers. Beyond the profit share arrangement whereby Apple demands a contentious 30% commission on subscriptions purchased through its Newsstand, Apple’s previous unwillingness to share the personal information of iOS magazine subscribers with publishers was a deal-breaker for Time Inc.

British Prime Minister David Cameron appeared before the Leveson Inquiry today to answer questions about his relationship with the press. The Guardian has detailed coverage.

Journalism.co.uk reports that the Times has launched an “experimental Tumblr page” for its Opinion section, which will offer “a flavour of what our columnists and leader writers do,” outside of the Times’s strict paywall.

Jonathan Stray has published a piece for Nieman Lab arguing that, in the modern media environment, we need new, better models for crime reporting. Stray has also led a Twitter discussion about how journalists can cover crime, and has collected the results together in a Storify at the bottom of the article.

The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade reports that ELLE is planning to produce an issue edited entirely by interns. The magazine launched a competition two weeks ago to find young people to fill 10 editorial roles for its October edition, and has received just under 400 applications, writes Greenslade.

Not content with a soon-to-be-launched video streaming network and a host of new European editions, the Huffington Post is releasing a new weekly iPad magazine tomorrow named “Huffington.”

The New York Times previews the new publication, noting that some content will be pulled from huffingtonpost.com, but other articles will also be “new and separate from that of the rest of the site”. The magazine, which is only available though the Apple store, will feature a mix of long-form pieces (of between 4,000 and 8,000 words), photos, commentary, reviews, illustrations, videos and data visualisations.

“From the beginning we wanted to do something that felt like a print magazine," says Huffington’s creative director Josh Klenert (formerly of Billboard), quoted by Joe Pompeo at Capital New York.

The Guardian correspondent in Athens, Jon Henley, reports that former journalists from Greece’s second-largest paper Eleftherotypia – which, due to lack of money, has only published two editions since December last year – are returning to work unpaid to put out third special edition of the paper, which will be published the day before the country’s general election. Henley writes that this could well be the paper’s final edition, and notes that former Eleftherotypia journalists have not been paid since August 2011.

AFP writes that former British prime minister John Major has directly contradicted Rupert Murdoch’s assertion before the Leveson Inquiry that he had "never asked a prime minister for anything." John Major told the inquiry today that, during a dinner in 1997, Murdoch had demanded Major change his policy on Europe, reports AFP.