Sussex councillors have reacted with happiness that their staff have registered around 34 million hits on social networking site Facebook in the past year, onenewspage.com reports. The three councils actively encourage their employees to use the site to get in touch with local residents who may have issues or questions they wish to raise. With the network providing a quick, free and easy way to get in touch with representatives, more Brits than ever are taking to the site, which prompted the Sussex councils to actively promote its usage among workers to undertake their own version of Facebook marketing.

Jay Penske, who bought the century-old Hollywood tabloid Variety in a fire salelast year, has clearly gotten religion about the power of the web - which isn't surprising, since his Deadline Hollywood site is likely one of the factors that helped bring about Variety's demise. So it shouldn't come as a shock that Penske is dismantling much of the existing magazine, including its daily print edition, and is getting rid of the paywall in a move he described as "the end of an error."

Print sales may be down - but the online traffic for regional newspapers is on the up and up. According to the ABC's audit of website activity, there were double-digit increases for every publisher in the last six months of 2012 compared to the same period the year before. Top of the tree were the two publishers - Iliffe and Northcliffe - that have since merged to form Local World. Iliffe was up 24.4%, with an average of 55,844 unique daily browsers, while Northcliffe had a 23% rise to 371,969, and its monthly uniques totalled 6.9 million.

BBC Radio 2 has been criticised after posting an insensitive message on Twitter following a hot air balloon accident in Egypt. Two Britons were among the 19 people killed when the balloon crashed Tuesday near the city of Luxor. BBC tweeted: 19 tourists are believed to have died in a hot air balloon crash in Egypt.Have you tried something you wouldn't normally on holiday? #r2vine Steve Berry parodied: "RT @BBCRadio2 6m Jews were annihilated as part of Hitler's Final Solution. Ever argued with your neighbours over land borders? #r2vine."

About 28.6% of Western European SMBs with employees ranging between 20 and 499 currently use social media for business purposes, according to a new report from IDC. The report reveals that social media adoption in the region is anticipated to progress at a fast pace in the following two years. According to the report the adoption of social media depends on the size of the company, and larger the company the higher will be the adoption for business purposes.

When Andrew Sullivan announced that he was taking his immensely popular blog, The Dish, independent and behind a metered paywall, he raised $333,000 in 24 hours. In the remainder of January, The Dish raised an additional $185,000. Then, on February 21, the site turned on its paywall, and so far this month it's raised $93,000, Sullivan wrote Monday. That's a total of $611,000 in a little under two months - about two-thirds of the $900,000 Sullivan believes the site needs to operate in its first year.

More than 40 local newspaper websites have dropped in Google PageRank score after running advertorials with hyperlinks. The advertorials promoting Interflora ahead of Valentine's Day also resulted in the florist losing search rankings, as described in a blog post published on Friday by SEO expert Anthony Shapley. Shapley explains that Interflora was "exceptionally aggressive" when preparing for Valentine's Day. He estimates the company placed more than 150 advertorials on UK news sites.

Exact Editions, a platform for magazines seeking to publish their content as an app, has released version of its iOS app that includes social media integration and bookmarking. Users can bookmark articles for later reading or share them via Facebook, Twitter, email or text message. Social sharing is something that publishers using other app publishing platforms are also doing. Last week Dennis Publishing announced it had invested in app software Padify and was using the platform to produce apps with social and bookmarking features.

Yandex has launched its own alternative Android app store, Yandex.Store, and updated its 3D interface for Android-based smartphones, Yandex.Shell. At launch, Yandex.Store will offer more than 50,000 apps ranging from social networks, entertainment, games, news, business and finance, including Twitter, Foursquare and Cut the Rope, as well as Russian social networks VK and Odnoklassniki (Classmates) and instant messenger ICQ.

George Eustice MP, one of the leaders of around 75 Tory MPs who support tougher press regulation, has written in The Guardian that the Royal Charter plan put forward by the Conservative leadership two weeks ago "represents a basis on which we can all move forward". This follows comments from Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman who said at the weekend "we'll definitely look at a Royal Charter but it can't be one which drives a coach and horses through Leveson, it's got to be actually delivering the standards that Leveson set forth".