In a briefing in Melbourne to editorial staff at The Age, The Sunday Age and theage.com.au website, Garry Linnell said a new editorial model to be introduced from July 1 would reverse the ratio of print staff to digital staff. He briefed Fairfax's Sydney editorial staff on Monday about the coming changes. Fairfax has for several months run an editorial review project in Sydney and Melbourne to determine how newsrooms and their staff will work as a digital media company. The first set of recommendations from that project will be released in the next four weeks ready for the July …

The scheme is set to be announced in a speech to the Publishers Association today by universities and science minister David Willetts. It comes in the wake of a growing campaign for open access in academic publishing, as cash-strapped universities face millions of pounds' costs each year to subscribe to research journals. Wales was brought in earlier this year to become an adviser on how Whitehall could make policy decisions more transparent, and will now advise on a project to set up a gateway to publicly-funded research on the web.

Neelie Kroes is hoping France can liberalise its digital copyright regime, after introducing a policy to warn and disconnect illegal content downloaders. France's Hadopi public agency, created to administer sending of warnings to alleged freeloaders, sent 755,015 first warnings to ISP subscribers in its first 14 months of operation. But now it is also conducting a review of whether France's underpinning copyright law itself needs some technical reform.

A survey of 2,000 social network users finds that Britons happily lie on Facebook and Badoo to look cooler and more interesting, 16% prefer to communicate online rather than in person or on the phone and 20% has missed out on a milestone event because of fiddling with a camera. The results showed that social networks appear to bolster people's confidence (26%) and help facilitate new friendships (33%). However, the cost can be high with 27% admitting they get lonely.

Rhodri Marsden says so what? "The social impact of technology on the digitally dominant, the digitally deft or digitally deaf is something we're still trying to work out. We don't know. But the studies roll out, regardless, claiming to provide some kind of measurement of solitude. You wouldn't get a news report saying that 3% of people don't get out much, but if they're using a laptop, we suddenly need to be worried? The crucial question that's rarely asked in such studies is 'And are you happy?'"

Sixty-five percent of those surveyed say they use social networks to share their faith in an intentional way. Seventy-one percent post links to Christian sites or content with missional values, while 73% intentionally post or link to content in order to share their faith. Interestingly, social media activity is prolific across the age spectrum and is not just a preserve of young people as is widely thought. However, younger people are more likely to have a larger proportion of non-Christian friends, and are more active in sharing their faith online: 87% of 16-18 year-olds said they do so intentionally.

The news publisher is preparing to kill off its iPad and iPhone app. It launched an HTML5 web app and pulled its iOS app off iTunes Store in mid-2011 but left the iOS version usable by subscribers with it already installed. Now, however, the Financial Times will render the iOS app unusable by its remaining users over the next month, as it completes its HTML5 migration. The publisher recently acquired Assanka, the development house which coded its HTML5 web app, and this week announced it had been rebranded "FT Labs".

The BBC News website has won the People's Voice award for news at this year's Webbys. Other awards went to Pinterest, Google+ and Spotify, all of whom picked up their first Webbys. The Daily Beast won the judges' award for news website. Commenting on the BBC News website's win, editor Steve Herrmann said: "It's a real honour to win the People's Voice award once again. This award is hugely appreciated by everyone working to make sure BBC News online remains such a valued service to the public, in the UK and around the world."

Google Analytics, a service that helps digital advertisers track web trends, shows that last week there were almost five times more searches for "Boris Johnson" than for "Ken Livingstone" via google.co.uk. Britons looked up the Conservative candidate online 11,629 times, compared to 2,337 searches for Livingstone. The digital marketing firm iProspect said search trends were also in Johnson's favour prior to his 2008 victory.

The firms - Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media - will have to fulfil the legal demand within weeks, but a sixth - BT - has requested more time to consider its position. It follows a ruling by Mr Justice Arnold in February that both the operators and users of The Pirate Bay website infringe the copyright of music companies. The Pirate Bay is the world's largest BitTorrent site, enabling and encouraging the mass illegal distribution of copyrighted content, including music, movies, TV programmes, games and publications.