If you’ve been wanting to figure out what actually happened with the whole Fiscal Cliff brouhaha but have needed a little sugar to help the medicine go down, the Washington Post recaps the entire debate in animated GIFs and infographics.
Want to have social media strategists from NASA, Toyota, and the San Francisco Giants as your teachers and consultants? Today only, we're offering $100 off AllFacebook Marketing Conference and AllTwitter Marketing Conference and $200 off a Combo Pass to attend both events. This offer expires at midnight, so register now with the code ONEDAY and save. 
The Washington Post and The Guardian, a reputable U.K. paper, said this week they will pull their social reader apps from Facebook.
Digg faces an uncertain future as the Washington Post prepares to “acquihire” the aggregation site’s technology team, according to a report by AllThingsD. Insert graveyard pun here.
Ongo, a new subscription based news service backed by the Washington Post, Gannett, and the New York Times, is betting that users will pay $6.99 a month for ad free online news.
Founder Alex Kazim, an eBay alum, received $12 million in funding from the three publishing giants back in September.
Ongo, which promises a “fundamentally new way” of reading news, aggregates news from multiple sources, and includes full content from the Washington Post, and Gannett’s USA Today, as well as selected content from the New York Times and the Financial Times.
News aggregation online has been around for a while, but Ongo also maintains an editorial staff to cherrypick and promote important or interesting stories.
“Our smart tools ensure that readers get the news they need while our editorial team spotlights the interesting, informative and entertaining stories that shouldn’t be missed,” said Kazim in a statement.
News from other papers such as the Charlotte Observer, Detroit Free Press, and Kansas City Star must be added a la carte style, starting at 99 cents.
With newspaper subscription revenue on the decline, and a slew of news content available for free online, publishers have been scrambling to come up with a new way to make money. The Financial Times currently restricts online news stories behind a pay wall, and the New York Times is expected to follow suit.
Whether users will subscribe to what amounts to a paid version of Google News remains to be seen, but Ongo is hoping that built-in article sharing incentives, free “day passes,” and free one month trial subscriptions will bring them in the door.
Washington Post launches an iPad app and plans for paid subscriptions while controversy surround rules around publishing apps
In a tasteful display of using social media to commemorate a tragedy, the Washington Post’s #wherewereyou hashtag made its way around the Twitter-verse this weekend to get users to share where they were on September 11th, 2001. The semantics of the tag itself and the poignancy of the event that is still fresh in many American’s memories no doubt contributed to the outpouring of responses originating from the Washington Post’s Twitter page, but Nieman Journalism Lab points out that the very nature of digital media has caused the hashtag to shift in meaning and begin documenting other sentiments as well. The call for 9/11 memories on Twitter reflects not only the nation on a day of mourning and remembrance, but also the way digital media is both perpetuating and changing history.
Read more
