Five industry experts from local, national and international news outlets share their predictions for digital journalism in 2014. The 10 key trends they identified include short-form video, private social media, drone journalism, responsive design and new apps and devices. Jason Mills, online editor at ITV News, believes that "mobile is clearly the growth space for news providers, and potentially for advertisers as well."

Google has bought a small Swiss app developer called Bitspin, known for its Timely alarm clock app. Timely has a neat gesture-based user interface, a "Smart Rise" mode that gently introduces the alarm sound ahead of time in order to wake the user from a deep sleep, and the ability to synchronize alarms between devices. The Zurich-based outfit said that the app would "continue to work as it always has," but David Meyer opines that we'll also see the stock Android alarm get a bit smarter soon.

Guardian News and Media (GNM) has appointed former Google chief engineer Shannon Maher and Net-a-Porter's Stuart Boundy to the roles of engineering director and head of web operations respectively. Maher was previously senior engineering leader at Google where he headed up the display ad teams at the search giant's Seattle and Kirkland offices - a role he held for just over two years having left in February 2013.

The elite English public school has blocked access to the instant messaging app from its own wireless network amid fears that boys were using it to send sexts - sexual images, usually of the user. Messages self-delete after 10 seconds but some pictures can be captured permanently by taking screenshots. "It is blocked from the Eton wireless internet system," Tony Little, the headmaster, told the Telegraph.

Out of the 10 UK stories listed, four revolve around a visual element - a video, picture story or interactive - and one story's URL is for the outlet's mobile site. Compared to previous years, the most social story on Facebook has almost twice the number of interactions than that of 2011 and has more than double that of 2012. The No. 1 story was reported on MailOnline: "Harassed boyfriend jumped to his death after his girlfriend insisted on going into another clothes shop".

When the political blogger left the Daily Beast at the beginning of last year to launch his own standalone, subscription-driven website called The Daily Dish, no one knew what to expect - including Sullivan himself. A daily site with a team of half a dozen people financed entirely by reader donations seemed almost too good to be true, and the former Atlantic and New Republic writer upped the ante by promising he would have almost $1 million in revenue by the end of his first year.

A total of 108 journalists were killed in targeted attacks over the past year while a further 15 died accidentally, according to new figures from the International Federation of Journalists. The countries with the highest numbers of deaths were Syria, where 15 journalists lost their lives in targeted attacks, bombings and cross-fire incidents in 2013, the IFJ said. Then came Iraq, with 13 such deaths, Pakistan, the Philippines and India, each with 10 deaths, Somalia, with seven, and Egypt, with six.

Around 250 leading academics from around the world have decried the online spying activities of U.S. and European intelligence services in a manifesto. The signatories work in a variety of fields. One, Cambridge University Head of Cryptography Ross Anderson, also gave an interview to Forbes in which he called for the abolition of the UK Security Service, also known as MI5, arguing that national security should be a job for the police.

Twitter has become integral to how news organisations source and distribute stories and as such, we collated a list of 2013's most socially-shared news stories on the social network, using the social data tool Searchmetrics. Half of the top ten are picture or video stories and, compared to previous years, the most tweeted story in 2013 is almost four times higher than that of 2011and nearly 40 per cent higher than that of 2012.

The act introduces a "new serious harm threshold" designed to help people understand when claims should be brought and discourage wasteful use of court time. Ministers claim the new legislation "reverses the chilling effect" previous libel laws have had on freedom of expression and legitimate debate. Journalists, scientists and academics have faced unfair legal threats for fairly criticising a company, person or product in the past, the Ministry of Justice said.