New startup Assignmint has an ambitious goal: To change freelance journalism as we know it. The company, headed by former New York Press and Forbes Traveler editor Jeff Koyen, will offer a complete pitch-to-payment cloud workflow system for freelancers and their employers. It helps digitally manage work assignments, editorial calendars, invoices, pitches, expenses, contract information, and payment. Freelance journalists, meanwhile, will be able to have access to all their outstanding invoice and payment information in one place. The startup also plans to implement a clip and algorithm service to match freelancers with potential new clients.

‘Google Consumer Surveys’ is a survey tool which blocks sections of webpages or articles until the reader answers a question, paying the website owner five cents per response when they do. The service is being billed as an alternative revenue model for publishers considering a pay wall strategy, launching with a handful of news partners last week.

The service works as a DIY research tool, charging users 10 cents per response to questions of the their choice. Buyers of the research have the option to pay an extra 40 cents per response to target sub-populations based on gender, age and location and can target more specific audiences, such as dog owners, with a screening and follow-up question option that costs an additional 50 cents per response.

Carrying on from a raft of new figures on how tablet ownership is about to explode, Futuresource Consulting has now said that there will be twice as many tablet owners in USA and western Europe by 2014.

...Content consumption at work is one of the key audience trends in publishing today and it's important to understand the patterns of browsing on-the-job. A real must-read post from media academic Paul Bradshaw, who has re-visited his 2007 research on news consumption, points out how crucial the workplace is in online reading habits.

Local mobile searches will surpass local desktop searches for the first time in 2016, according to a new study by BIA/Kelsey. The report projects that users will conduct 113.4 billion local mobile searches vs. 85.6 billion local searches via desktop. By comparison, in 2011 there were 54.9 billion desktop searches against 19.7 billion mobile searches.

Read It Later (the company name stays the same) has 4.5 million users and says YouTube is its apps’ most popular source of content (YouTube is also the company’s most-saved domain across platforms). Forty percent of items saved aren’t articles but content like videos, images, things to buy, travel tips and recipes. Fifty percent of items saved through the app are viewed on mobile screens, up from 34 percent in January. And 33 percent of saved items come from third-party apps like Twitter, Zite, Flipboard and Pulse.

...According to new research from Forrester. A third of tablet owners polled say that they are less likely to read a book or use a PC now that they have a tablet, while a quarter say they read print newspapers and magazines less frequently, in the latest evidence that consumers are shifting to digital consumption habits. Perhaps interestingly, TV is proving relatively resilient, with just 12% of those surveyed saying they watch TV less frequently as a result of having a tablet. The report chimes with research from Juniper that asserts that growth in the tablet market is coming at the expense of desktop PC use.

According to MediaMind's “The Rich and the Powerful,” rich media ads overall prompted user click-throughs at four times the rate of standard banners; rich media ads that feature video resulted in click-throughs nine times higher. Rich media ads also tended to increase site visits that didn't involve clicks...

There's a growing debate about the impact of Facebook's Timeline interface on fan engagement. Hearst Magazines, for one, has seen positive results across 19 of its magazine brand pages that have converted to the Timeline... Facebook's Milestones feature is what makes the Timeline a timeline. This is a great feature for any publication with archival content such as articles or old cover pages.

Because, in the end, storytelling is what journalism is all about.

The art of this app is that it doesn’t overwhelm you like the site with a torrent of content. It is highly curated each day to give the user a taste. And this seems to us a novel and thoughtful way to come at the tablet.Understanding that the evening tablet user is in lean-back/lean in mode, the brand gives her a glimpse of the NG brand’s offerings that doesn’t require serious investment but can reward the ambitious content digger. The site lets you track back over previous days of NG content from the app, parse the full catalog by four categories: videos, articles, galleries, featured photos. Or you can view the back catalog by a calendar interface.