The U.S. spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and that's a pretty big deal because she's a head of state, but this wasn't purely a one-sided affair. According to a Friday report in the Sddeutsche Zeitung, German intelligence also listened in on a call involving erstwhile U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The U.S. government will have known about this already, because the information comes from documents given to the CIA by "Markus R.", a mole within the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) - you may recall that his uncovering was part of the impetus for Germany asking the CIA's Berlin station chief …

Banner ads account for a small 4% of mobile ads run by entertainment brands, as the market moves towards rich media formats to complement the growing consumption of video thanks to smartphone technology. Vidopia analysed entertainment mobile ad campaigns viewed by 23 million people in the UK over a year. The study found that the share of banner ads dropped from 14% to 4% in just six months. Video and rich media formats now account for 96%.

Since launching in the UK on March 27th, Readly, the digital platform allowing subscribers access to numerous UK magazines for a single monthly subscription, has added a further 25 titles from 12 publishers. This takes Readly's total number of available UK magazine titles to 145.

The Premier League has warned fans not to post unofficial videos of goals online after thousands of goals were shared during the World Cup. Through Vine, a popular video sharing service owned by Twitter, fans can upload unofficial clips of football action in an instant. A @FootballVines Twitter page has more than 539,000 followers. Fans may see the clips for free, although the quality can be poor.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has joined the citizen journalism ranks, posting Vines and tweeting throughout the weekend as he joined the protests being held in Ferguson Missouri after an unarmed 18-year old was shot dead by police on 9 August. Dorsey, who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, tweeted on Friday that he would be heading home to St Louis, and later joined the marches, posting first-hand accounts of the protests along with updates on Twitter.

Immediate Media Co, the special interest content and platform company, has appointed Dean Fitzpatrick as Managing Partner, Branded Content - a new role in the business. With forecasters predicting almost GBP4 billion of content marketing activity in the coming year, Immediate Media's Contract Publishing Director Alfie Lewis says: "The content marketing industry is booming - and evolving faster than ever - as branded content programmes, native advertising, creative solutions and social media combine to produce a content wave."

7digital has struck a music deal thought to be worth GBP1m-plus with BlackBerry to launch a new music service, two months after its share price nose-dived following the troubled Canadian smartphone company shutting its music and video app store. Digital music company 7digital saw its share price almost halve weeks after launching on the AIM stock market, when major customer BlackBerry announced it was closing the music and video app sections of BlackBerry World.

Britain's consumer magazines lost nearly 1m print sales in the first half of the year, according to the latest health check for the industry. As publishers continue to search for alternative revenue streams from the internet and digital products, the Audit Bureau of Circulations said on Thursday sales of the hundreds of paid-for weekly and monthly titles fell 4.4% compared with the previous six months.

Twitter this morning exclusively premiered Michael Jackson's new music video 'a Place with no Name' after singing an agreement with Epic Records sealing the site's first of a kind move. The social network, which usually hosts music videos links, today, hosted the exclusive video launch as part of a new 'Promoted Video' scheme which aims to push branded video content towards users.

Twitter users have failed to heed previous lessons in declaring the guilt of a celebrity under criminal investigation, with Sir Cliff Richard the latest focus of attention through the microblogging platform after his home was searched by police in connection to an alleged historic sexual offence.