Noel Young, chairman of the Online Media Awards judging panel, looks at the future of free news, asking whether readers should pay for online journalism. "How's this for a vision of the future: hordes of 30-somethings getting all their news from TV and broadcasts, printing off the odd page from Facebook to get that tactile feeling referred to by Rupert Murdoch. Newspapers? Gonzo. Partly because they couldn't all get their act together to start charging."

The Guardian was named "website of the year" at last week's Online Media Awards "for not losing its news sense and judgment just because the distribution of the stories is digital". The site "gets the right balance between serious news and lighter features and sports and it is so easy to navigate", according to a release. Guardian special projects editor Paul Lewis took the award for best Twitter feed. His tweets reporting on the England riots were among the nominations which led to Lewis being shortlisted for the Orwell Prize reporter of the year award earlier this year. Another of …

As part of a new safe-sex initiative, the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control (SMI) has launched an app called Provligget, or Test Nooky, allowing you to do just that. "The focus is on condom use ... we're trying to get this issue on the agenda," explained Karin Raagsjoe, who came up for the idea for the app for SMI. The app allows users to "test sex" with fantasy characters, ranging from a personal trainer, to an unfaithful woman, to a handyman, all portrayed by more or less famous Swedish actors. Once users make their choice, they are asked if …

Research by mobile phone experts Recombu revealed a "worrying" trend of people opening up their lives to strangers online. According to the survey of 2,000 people conducted in February, 2012 by OnePoll, 75% of Brits have accepted a friend request from someone they don't know on Facebook. Some 82% of Facebook users were found to speak to 25 or fewer of their Facebook friends on a regular basis. The global average for the number of Facebook friends is 190, but the average 22-year-old has closer to 1,000 online friends, according to official data from Facebook. Britain was also revealed to …

MEPs on a key European parliamentary committee have voted to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) by 19 votes to 12. Many regard it as the deathblow for the controversial treaty because the trade committee formally recommends how to vote to the wider parliament. The European Parliament vote is due to take place in July. Acta aims to tighten rules on both online and offline piracy but has attracted many critics. One of its harshest detractors has been UK MEP David Martin, the lead member of the committee.

The relaunched web site with a new design has promised users a "new wave of interactive content" later in the year focused on the broadcaster's own journalism. The redesign which went live on this week, has seen the site undergo changes in response to "significant advances in technology" since its 2007 launch "and by the enormous change that social media has wrought in the way that news is sources and delivered", according to a press release.

ABC figures have revealed the site received 91,687,074 unique visits in May - up over a million from April. The Guardian website came second, with 60,847,400 views; followed by the Telegraph website on 49,958,693 - up five million from April. However, it was the London Evening Standard's website that saw the highest growth from April: up 33.31% to 3,356,950.

The UK failed to pick up any major awards in the digital or radio categories at this year's Cannes Lions, the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, prompting one juror to call it a "wake up call" for British agencies. In their worst performance since 2007 in the digital category, known as the Cyber Lions, UK agencies failed to win a single gold. The UK has one of the highest proportionate spends of ad money on the internet, close to GBP5 billion last year, accounting for 28% of total advertising spend on all media, according to the Internet Advertising Association. The …

A study of more than 600 journalists across the world found that more than half source and verify news stories using known sources on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Weibo. The research found 75% of journalists in the UK do so. The annual Oriella Digital Journalism Study, which surveys journalists across 16 countries, found the use of social media in the gathering of news "is now a majority pursuit" when working with known sources on such platforms. More than half, 53%, of journalists use "microblog updates" from known sources, and in the UK alone this figure rises …

Quartz, which will launch in September, is primarily aimed at tablet users and is free of charge. It will target the international business class that lives life on the move. "If you look at the business people operating in this new economy, they are people who are in a sense post-national," Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company toldThe Independent. "They spend more time outside their own countries, they are on aeroplanes all the time, they're borderless and living mobile existences." Other news organisations will watch Quartz as a potential model for digital news provision.