The jury in the Rebekah Brooks trial has retired to consider its verdicts on a string of offences related to phone hacking, corruption and perversion of the course of justice. They began their deliberations shortly after 3.30pm, bringing the eight-month trial, involving seven defendants including Andy Coulson, David Cameron's former spin doctor, to its final phase. They will consider verdicts on seven counts facing the seven defendants, including four charges against Brooks and three against Coulson.

The Daily Record is merging its print and digital divisions into a single team which will produce content across all platforms. The title will take on more writers and photographers for the Daily Record and sister paper the Sunday Mail, and the 'audience first' merger of multi-platform teams will roll out to other Media Scotland - which is owned by Trinity Mirror - titles later in the year.

The need to urgently shield investigative journalism in the post-Edward Snowden era is the burning issue in newsrooms globally, according to the World Editors Forum's Trends in Newsrooms 2014 report, launched this week. The report was released at a gathering of more than 1,000 media professionals in Turin, Italy, at the annual World Newspaper Congress. Based on interviews with more than 30 editors in a dozen countries, the Paris-based World Editors Forum has identified the top trends in newsrooms in 2014.

With the launch of new site after new site in 2014, it's been a fascinating time to watch digital media try to figure itself out. Amid the turmoil of disruption, buffeted by tech companies' control over information distribution, but aware of new fields of possibility, the past few years were filled with defending legacy brands. Vox, FiveThirtyEight, the Upshot, Matter, Circa,and Inside seem like the first full-fledged embodiments of a bunch of arguments about what will work in digital media.

"You only have to observe the painful and austere transition of Time Inc. to see the grim portents of a much leaner future. And a lot of this has to do with a double problem: how to get revenue from readers and from advertisers in sufficient amounts to sustain the kind of outfit that was once so dominant. Right now, most big sites have no purely online subscribers and the ad rates are leagues below what they once were for print - and declining. In so far as digital advertising is growing, the lion's share goes to new media companies …

The Online News Association today launched a 'build your own ethics code' project to help "news organisations, small start-ups and individual bloggers" create their own code of ethics. Made up of a series of Google Docs, the project is freely accessible to all but is still in a crowdsourcing stage, inviting journalists and editors to comment and make suggestions. "No single ethics code can reflect the needs of everyone in our widely varied profession," said Tom Kent, standards editor and deputy managing editor of the Associated Press, in an introduction to the document.

The experiment between DDB Dsseldorf and MediaMonks, also lets users break down contributions by age, gender, industry and even individual contributors. The goal, according to DDB Dusseldorf managing direct Dennis May, is digital representation of how the individuality of handwriting can represent a global character. "There are few things more personal than your handwriting. So we thought that it would be a good experiment to see how we could use this personal thing to talk about something more global," said May.

Scottish Independence is the go-to platform for expert reporting, polling data, opinion and in-depth analysis of the debate as it develops over the coming months in the lead up to the referendum on 18th September, say the publishers. The site is the first of its kind from Johnston Press, which partnered with technology provider PublishThis to bring real-time content and curation, offering a new model that JP will use to launch in other areas of interest across the UK.

A mere 4% of companies are implementing full bring your own device policies in the UK, according to a survey by trade group CompTIA. Half of British companies still fully control the use of mobile devices, not allowing employees to bring their own despite a quarter reportedly working between home and the office. Seth Robinson, director of technology analysis at CompTIA, said: "The new norm is quickly becoming one employee, three devices. PCs, smartphones and tablets will all remain major components in the workplace for some time."

Digital news audiences have risen by 23 per cent in the last year, according to the new World Press Trends report, but publishers are not making the most of their increased audience in terms of revenue. Framing the report in the context of the ongoing attacks against journalists around the world - from imprisonment of Al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt to the assault of reporters at protests in Ukraine, Venezuela and Thailand - Larry Kilman, deputy chief executive of WAN-IFRA, said the press was more relevant than ever before.