A political row has erupted over the BBCs decision to appoint a former Labour minister, James Purnell, as its new GBP295k a-year director of strategy and digital. The former culture secretary is a former head of corporate planning at the broadcaster and landed the plum position after being offered the role directly by incoming director-general Tony Hall... without advertising the vacancy to others in a bid to save money.

A UK judge has said that Google and other internet companies could be held responsible for libellous postings on their websites if they fail to remove them quickly. The ruling was part of a case filed in 2012 by Payam Tamiz, a law student and former Conservative party local council candidate in London's Court of Appeal. According to the Guardian, the court ruled that a gap of five weeks between a complaint being made and the removal of allegedly defamatory comments on a blogpost could leave it open to libel action.

Ofcom has awarded the licence for regional television in the Leeds area to network bidder Made in Leeds. The company is part of the same group - Made Television - which will be responsible for local television stations in Bristol, Cardiff and Tyne & Wear. Made in Leeds' Freeview channel will launch in November this year, and the channel says it will broadcast to more than one million people in Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield and Dewsbury.

The so-called "burstiness" of content could make it more prevalent on Twitter, econsultancy.com reports. Twitter has claimed that it's put into place a number of updates to its mobile platform that puts "tweets, user accounts, images, news, related searches and more into a single stream of results." Furthermore, the "burstiness" of each will be a deciding factor in how highly it ranks in a search.

News Corp is reportedly shopping its popular technology blog, AllThingsD. If true, this could see fixtures of the tech reporting scene like Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher join another company. According to Reuters, the contract between AllThingsD and News Corp is up at the end of the year and relations between the two entities are "amicable but stressed." A spokesperson for News Corp said by email that the company declines comment.

Members of the Association of Online Publishers in the UK together saw a 12 per cent increase in digital advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012, year-on-year, according to figures released by the AOP. The growth results were based on the AOP's Digital Publishers Revenue Index which, for the first time in five years, shared its headline results with the press. More detail on the revenue recorded in the fourth quarter was not available at the time of writing.

Photographs that appear to identify one of the grown-up killers of James Bulger have been removed from the internet after the attorney general,Dominic Grieve, launched an investigation. The pictures purported to show Jon Venables, now 30, who was given a new identity following his initial release from prison. Venables and his classmate Robert Thompson abducted and murdered two-year-old James in Liverpool 20 years ago this week. A court order bans publication of any information that could lead to revelation of their new identities.

Fast-growing UK Internet usage is highlighted today with the comScore news that UK users spend 37 hours online in December last year, more than any other European market. Also big news : Nearly one-third of web-based page views in the UK are now on mobiles and tablets. The info appears in comScore's report, 2013 UK Digital Future in Focus. According to the study, UK consumers are more digitally-engaged than ever before and their usage of mobile, internet-enabled devices is re-defining the UK media landscape.

Looks like Cupid didn't visit this Esso garage in Manchester today as its digital display board was used by a girl called Laura to dump her unsuspecting boyfriend. The mean-spirited lass paid for the board as its where her now ex-boyfriend gets his lunch. Displayed today at Laura's request the ad was paid for in-full last week. The board in question usually advertises deals on chocolates and snacks for sale in the garage, but can be hired for a GBP100-a-month.

Men's Health magazine recorded the highest average circulation for its digital editions in the second half of last year, according to results published by the Audit Bureau of Circulation today. According to ABC, digital editions refer to "a digital version of a print publication", as opposed to digital publications, which are considered "stand-alone publications" with "no consideration of editorial or advertising similarity" and as a result can feature "dynamically served ads".