Cathy Newman, a host for for Channel 4 News, tweeted late Wednesday morning: "Much hilarity in morning meeting about Prince Harry's exploits. We can't show the pix even though they're all over the web. Right or wrong?" And the Guardian in a brief news post said that royal aides were understood to have warned British media organizations not to publish the photos.

The German news publisher and ad company recently-formed Axel Springer Digital Classifieds joint venture is acquiring allesklar.com, the operator of 16-year-old meinestadt.de, a network of 337 local news and information sitelets underpinned by several categories of classified ads. t will gain a large local network through which to pipe meinestadt.de's existing ads as well as those from Springer's other sites.

Britain could get its first taste of 4G this autumn after regulators approved an application by the company that owns the T-Mobile andOrange networks to launch the next generation of mobile internet on 11 September. Telecoms watchdog Ofcom has granted Everything Everywhere, Britain's largest mobile company with 27 million customers, permission to launch 4G on its existing spectrum without having to wait for the auction of British airwaves scheduled to conclude early next year.

Canadian publisher Postmedia today launched paywalls for a number of its newspaper websites, including the Vancouver Sun, The Province and Ottawa Citizen. The metered paywalls introduced for digital content at these three titles will apply to all users. Postmedia has also introduced a paywall for international users on montrealgazette.com and nationalpost.com. The Gazette already had a paid-for content model which was introduced for its Canadian users in May last year.

Online entertainment retailer Play.com has looked into quantifying the advantages that Facebook marketing can offer, with many of the current estimates on the monetary value of fans being woolly or wildly varying. Now, the retailer has found that Facebook fans could be spending up to 24% more in direct sales than non-fans. For Play.com itself, this equated to around GBP2 million worth of extra sales in 2011 which can be solely attributed to Facebook fans.

From 10 September, the figures will be released, including website and print readership figures for all UK national newspapers and consumer magazines. Also included will be data from over 400, non-publisher websites and audience figures for print and online, as well as a comparison of in-depth print and online age and demographic profile data. The reach of websites will also be shown on both a weekly and daily basis, alongside page views and dwell time.

Google launched a broadside against a proposed law in Germany that would see search engines forced to pay license fees for linking people to news stories. Google's North Europe communications chief, Kay Oberbeck, sounded off this morning in a guest post for a German press agency. He also pointed out that Google sends readers to the publishers' sites, that anyone who doesn't want their content to be indexed by Google can throw a robots.txt file in there, and that publishers make money off Adsense.

The days of slumping passively in front of the goggle box whilst flickering rays of EastEnders wash over you seem to be at end, according to Deloitte's new television report. This charts the continued rise of so called 'second screening' whereby viewers surf the web or discuss what is blaring in the background via email, Facebook and Twitter on their laptops, smartphones and tablets.

Johnston Press, the challenged UK publisher with 230 local newspapers, is finding small digital gains as CEO Ashley Highfield begins implementation of his multi-platform turnaround strategy. Digital revenue in the first six months of this year grew by 8.4% to a still-small GBP10.3 million ($16.2 million) (announcement). That was thanks partly to a quarter more online property classified sales after Johnston outsourced its service to Zoopla last year.

The electronics brand will look to recruit fans to act as spokespeople for its products and services after admitting that its previous marketing strategies have failed to get across how its products can "change peoples lives." It will offer fans behind-the-scenes access to each of its sub-brands in the hope that by rewarding followers with content they will then go on to share feedback and promote the company's products to people in their wider network.