Johnston Press desperately needed to be dragged into the 21st Century when Ashley Highfield took the helm. The second largest publisher of newspapers in the UK, its business was built along traditional publishing lines, highly dependent on local classified, recruitment and cover price sales to service its massive debt. Highfield's first six month have been something of a baptism of fire.

The sports network currently holds the broadcast rights to show live matches from the Premier League and FA Cup in the UK. ESPN is committed to broadcasting the FA Cup and Premier League until the end of the 2013-2014 season in the UK. When the broadcast rights are up for auction again, the network expects strong competition from BSkyB and Al Jazeera, which has been making moves to boost its sports coverage.

Berlin's Moviepilot.com, which is making its big push into the U.S., hopes to kill both birds with one stone. And, judging from the $7 million Series B round it revealed on late last week, it's armed with a boulder. The IMDB rival is a Google-driven rumor and recommendation site that in turn powers Telekom's T-Entertain IPTV package, and it's very successful, with two million monthly uniques and 1.4 million Facebook fans. In fact, that makes it Germany's most popular Facebook page, bar that for soccer team Bayern Munich.

The Netherlands' Pirate Party has been ordered by a court in the Hague to stop publicising ways to circumvent blocks to The Pirate Bay. Anti-piracy group Brein had said that the political party was helping users overcome a previous ruling that had ordered two of the country's biggest internet service providers to prohibit access to TPB. A subsequent order instructed a further five ISPs to block access to the site.

Games will now be rated by the Video Standards Council (VSC) in line with Europe-wide guidelines. Previously, additional ratings were decided upon by the British Board of Film Classification. The new system means for the first time that anybody selling a 12-rated game to a child under that age could face jail.The Pan European Game Information system (Pegi) gives games an age rating as well as additional information such as violent content and bad language. The VSC will now rate games to Pegi's specifications while enforcing compliance among retailers.

The company plans to make superfast broadband available to two-thirds of premises in Britain by the end of 2014. From 2013, BT will begin to make fibre-to-the-premises available, offering speeds of up to 300-mbps initially, with scope to increase speeds to as much as 1-gigabit per second. The wholesale fibre broadband service has reached the 10 million landmark "several months ahead of schedule," BT said.

Police chiefs are calling on users of online social networking sites to be the "eyes and ears" of officers to help combat the menace of 'trolls' who bully or abuse via the web. Police forces across the UK are investing more funds into making sure they are plugged into sites like Twitter and Facebook but their nature means they are having to rely on users to self-regulate or to alert the authorities to criminal behaviour. The lead for the Association of Chief Police Officers on e-crime prevention, Chief Constable Stuart Hyde, said the police did not have the resources to …

Martin Clarke, publisher of Mail Online, which is second only to the New York Times in terms of its global audience, said it abided by a British media code restricting the use of pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge's sister going to work or shopping. This was contrary to Mail Online's rivals in America who freely published "hundreds" of pictures of Middleton taken each day by paparazzi photographers, he said. "That is a commercial disadvantage I just have to live with," he said.

Sales revenue at its national titles starting the year brightly up 10%, but slumping to a decline of 3% in March and April as total ad revenue fell 11% in the first four months. The trading update paints a mixed picture ahead of a tough annual meeting for departing chief executive Sly Bailey, where a significant number of investors are expected to vote against her remuneration, with tough ad revenue and circulation figures in part balanced by reductions in Trinity Mirror's net debt and pension deficit.

The Official Streaming Chart will launch next Monday, billed as the first chart to rank audio streams from both ad-funded and subscription services in the UK. The Official Streaming Chart is compiled with information from services including Spotify, We7, Napster, Deezer, Zune and ChartsNow. It will be published every week in music industry trade title, Music Week, and online at www.officialcharts.com. The Official Single Chart will mark its 60th anniversary in November.