The police are devoting valuable time dealing with squabbles on Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites which could be used to tackle more serious crimes, it has been claimed. While most disputes are brushed off by telling victims to ignore or delete their tormentors from their social media circles, some are so serious they end up in court. According to The Mail on Sunday at least three arrests are being made every day for sending offensive messages via phones and computers, including harassment by ex-partners and hoax threats.

Globally, one in five relationships now starts online and the media is full of stories describing happy marriages which started with the click of a mouse. Looking at it from a financial perspective, its estimated that globally the industry is worth more than GBP2bn. Online dating is now so important to the UK economy that the Office of National Statistics recently added online dating to its basket of goods and services to calculate UK inflation rates.

Technology companies are the new publishing power-brokers, so traditional players like Penguin and Random House have to hatch a new plan, says Katherine Rushton. Publishers are on the back foot. But hitched together, Penguin and Random House would be in a better position to take on the new generation of power-brokers, and accelerate growth in a digital age.

Future announced existing cooking title Jamie magazine as the first external client for FutureFolio - an interactive tablet-edition production suite the company designed in-house to build its own magazines but which it is now also pitching as a service to peers and rivals. The publisher will soon launch a spin-off of its tech news website TechRadar as a weekly iPad magazine, sitting between the existing TechRadar rolling website and Future's monthly T3 gadget magazine.

The Guardian has said it may be forced to make compulsory redundancies as its efforts to persuade journalists to leave voluntarily have failed. According to the FT it wants to save GBP7 million from its current editorial budget of GBP69 million by reducing its 650 editorial staff to around 550. But even this isn't going to help very much as in the year to April operating losses at the Guardian and its sister paper, the Observer increased to GBP44.2 million from GBP31.1 million despite strong growth in online revenues. Stephen Foster delves into the issue.

In an address to London School of Economics on the issue of social media, Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer QC responded to an audience member who asked: "Is it an offence to retweet something grossly offensive?" The DPP replied: "You retweet, you commit an offence under the Act." The offence falls under Section 127 of the Communications Act, which outlaws sending a tweet that is "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character".

A London 2012 Olympics hangover resulted in a decline in traffic for all UK national newspaper websites in September, with Independent.co.uk the worst hit. Independent.co.uk's daily unique browsers fell 15.95% month on month in September to 763,685. The Independent website's monthly unique browsers were down 15.7% to 16,306,316, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Thursday. In August Independent.co.uk enjoyed the biggest month-on-month traffic boost - with daily unique browsers up 22% - and year on year it was up 16%.

Future has hired former Centaur publisher Declan Gough to look after its range of digital design titles. Gough spent 24 years at Centaur, where he rose to become the group publisher of Creative Review and Design Week, before leaving last year to set up his own consultancy. As the publisher of Future's Digital Design Group, he will be responsible for titles including .Net, Creativebloq, 3D World and the Computer Arts brand.

KPN failed to meet analysts' third-quarter profits expectations due in large part to savage competition in Germany. The operator said its German E-Plus subsidiary was forced to cut pricing as customers searched for better deals. E-Plus, normally a key profit centre for KPN, signed up 210,000 new subscribers on monthly contracts during the quarter, but lower pricing resulted in a 9% drop in quarterly EBITDA according to Reuters.

UK children are becoming media multitaskers and are turning to smartphones and tablets for internet access, according to the latest report from the UK's media regulator, Ofcom, published this week. The findings of the report show that the way children access the internet and consume content is changing fast even though the proportion of UK children who access the internet has not increased year-on-year for the first time since the first annual report was done in 2005.