Christiane-Sophie Romano

The Bay Citizen is considering a potential merger, according to people involved in the discussions, a move that could see the publication absorbed by an older but similar nonprofit news organization in Berkeley, and raising questions about whether the founding patron's vision for a revitalization of Bay Area news reporting can survive him.

In a blog post at her eponymous website, Arianna Huffington has provided some numbers that describe the growth of the news network over the past year -- a year that coincided with its acquisition by AOL for $315 million -- and more than a few of them are eye-popping. At a time when some newspaper websites are happy to get page views in the tens of millions in a month, The Huffington Post racked up more than a billion page views in December.

A report released last week by Free Press contending television broadcasters will reap nearly $3 billion in revenue from political advertising this year without fully disclosing to the public where that money comes from has drawn a sharp rebuke from the NAB.

Today marks a milestone for Facebook. Originally launched in 2004 as a site for Harvard students to connect online, the social networking giant is now celebrating its eighth anniversary, just weeks after launching its new 'timeline' interface, the feature referred to by countless journalists as a social media 'gamechanger.'

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

Last fall, while television news outlets were largely ignoring the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act during their evening news and opinion programming, their parent companies were busy paying an army of lobbyists to influence Congress on the then-pending legislation.

In a rather troubling move, it appears that the leadership of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had a documentary filmmaker arrested on Congressional property for daring to try to film a hearing that was taking place on the subject of "fracking" -- an issue for which this filmmaker, Josh Fox, is well known for covering in his documentary Gasland.

A new report takes a deep look into the way journalists deal with copyright issues, which can affect not only their own careers, but journalism as a whole. The report draws conclusions from interviews with 80 journalists who have been working in the field for at least five years.

Unsolicited spam emails from petition website change.org forced Arizona State University to block access as well as outbound emails to the site, university officials said.

One of the worst parts of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was its ridiculous secrecy, under which it was easy for negotiators and industry reps to see draft text, but impossible for the public to do so except through leaks. Thankfully, those leaks showed just how bad ACTA was going to be for the Internet, and public pressure helped remove the worst provisions. But the basic approach to doing deals didn't die, and it's back again.

There is still a newspaper publishing market in the United States. Seventy-one of the country's daily newspapers changed hands last year in deals totaling just under $800 million. Why?

Last November Free Press released On the Chopping Block: State Budget Battles and the Future of Public Media, an inventory of dramatic state-level funding cuts to public broadcasting. Our report documents how state support for public broadcasting has plunged since the economy took a nosedive in 2008. What’s more, the report notes that politics — not financial considerations — have driven much of this budget cutting. Three months after the report's release, the funding picture for public media remains about as lovely as Voldemort.

You wouldn't think handling a notebook or a camera could be a hazardous line of work. But according to the latest global Press Freedom Index, abuse and oppression of reporters has made journalism an increasingly risky job in many countries. The past year has even left a notable taint on the U.S. press, despite the country's mythos as a beacon of free expression.

There is a new kind of ignorance afoot in the world, one that results from over-consumption of information rather than from a lack of access to it.

Did you know that Bulgaria has the highest level of broadband adoption, at 96 percent? Or that the average connection speed in South Korea is 16.7 megabits per second versus the global average connection speed of 2.7 Mbps? These are some of the fun facts included in Akamai's "State of the Internet" report for the third quarter of 2011.

The European Union's proposed "right-to-be-forgotten" data privacy rule threatens free speech and online business, critics argue.

Under Chairman Julius Genachowski, the FCC has been driving hard for the expansion of broadband into rural America. And it just announced cost-saving changes to its Lifeline subsidy program that will help fund a new test program to bring broadband to low-income households.

The FCC approved the overhaul of a phone subsidy program that would dedicate federal funds to bring broadband Internet service to low-income households. In a unanimous vote, the FCC voted to make several changes to its Lifeline program that for the past 25 years has subsidized landline phone and wireless services to poor areas. The fund has been criticized for waste and abuse.

Comcast is rolling out broadband-based home security and monitoring in metro Denver today, jumping into a market long tied to rival telcoms' landline phone service.

Silicon Valley and Wall Street have been watching since forever, it seems, for Facebook to go public. Signs are now that an IPO filing really could be imminent.