In retail, Amazon and Tesco have blazed trails, mining insight from millions of consumers at scale to better buy stock and recommend appropriate products to consumers. In finance, American Express is crunching account holders' transaction history en masse to identify loyalty and pre-empt churn. And, in sport, player and match data is now so abundant that clubs like Chelsea are examining attributes of players from leagues around the world to spot new talent. With a few exceptions, however, the TV industry is still not taking full advantage of the data opportunity to plan its future better.

A new court of appeal ruling could make it easier for journalists to request data under the UK Freedom of Information Act in a specific file format. The decision relates to a 2010 FoI request to Buckinghamshire County Council for information about the 11+ school entry exam to be supplied "in Excel format". When the council complied with the FoI request a month later, it supplied the applicant, Nick Innes, with 184 pages of data in PDF format instead.

The Sunday Times in partnership with Community Channel's Do Something Brilliant campaign has launched The Change Makers, a search for the UK's social innovator of the year. The competition aims to inspire people across the country to do something brilliant and to spark social change. The campaign celebrates local charities, communities and individuals from different corners of the UK, to inspire audiences to do the little brilliant things that make a big difference to themselves or their community.

The Telegraph website's 20% traffic boost in June has been attributed to factors including favouring Facebook over Twitter to push content and writing fewer stories overall, according to Jason Seiken. The Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief said an emphasis on carefully promoting stories with Facebook's more youth-oriented audience in mind has started to pay off, with the social network easily outstripping Twitter as a traffic driver. The surge in Facebook traffic referral in turn fuelled a bumper month of growth in June.

According to Izvestia, the first to receive notices include far-left writer Eduard Limonov, satirist Mikhail Zadornov, comedian Mikhail Galustyan, travel photographer Sergey Dolya, blogger mi3ch (Dmitry Chernyshev), crime novelist Boris Akunin andNews Media CEO Ashot Gabrelyanov. Vladimir Putin recently signed amendments to Russian communications law that created this registry, in order to place prominent bloggers under the same restrictions placed on traditional journalists - an interesting condition to place on satire.

Almost all (98 per cent) US major online publishers are selling ads programmatically, although fewer (72 per cent) have done so internationally, according to the latest IAB US report. The study, called Going Global: Programmatic Audience Development Around the World, was conducted across 145 advertisers, publishers, technology service providers in the US.

Online, premium publishers are competing with tech companies that champion efficiency in the ad market and a virtually limitless supply of ad inventory for ad buyers to choose from. For the likes of Google and Facebook, a race to the bottom is fine as long as they are the ones delivering all those ads at rock bottom prices. How can publishers with high production costs and little chance of building huge scale ever compete?

The rise of digital music and streaming has many crimes to answer for. Like a hardened assassin, it does what it has to and gets better at it all the time, seemingly unaware of the musicians and fans left in its wake. The latest victim, and perhaps the most depressing when it comes to the slow but steady bludgeoning of creativity within the field, is the album. Though fans cleave to it as a format, producers, presenters and industry pen-pushers know the writing is on the wall. Lana Del Rey's latest topped the UK charts with only 48,000 in first-week …