The big news of the moment is that the site WikiLeaks has published over 90,000 secret military documents related to the war in Afghanistan. Posted on Sunday, the documents had previously been shared with three publications (under embargo): The New York Times, The Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel.

Last month, reports came out that YouTube had a "top secret news experiment" in the works, which would involve citizen journalism and "going local in San Francisco." This was played down as simply a version of YouTube Direct.

Last week, Reddit announced Reddit Gold, a paid version of its service that would cost whatever users were willing to pay. This was essentially Reddit’s way of asking for donations to help with its operating costs, and giving those donors a little something extra.

It didn’t take long for Reddit to declare the initiative a triumph, saying, "We’re getting a much-needed cash infusion."

Last month the Federal Trade Commission published its staff discussion draft of potential policy recommendations to "support the reinvention of journalism." Those potential recommendations have been the subject of a fair amount of controversy throughout the industry.

Content publishers are excited about the iPad and other tablet devices. Such devices provide readers with a new way of interacting with content. Print publishers, in particular, are hopeful that this kind of publishing can make up for some of the losses they have experienced on the print side.

BusinessWire, the popular newswire service, is set to launch some new services for businesses and organizations next month. These are the NewsHQ online newsroom and the InvestorHQ investor center.

At the end of June, Google made some big changes to the Google News home page. In fact, Google called these changes the biggest redesign of Google News since its beta launch in 2002.

Many news consumers are increasingly relying on human-edited news aggregation and content curation to sift through their news and establish trust. While not all mainstream media sources are thrilled about the concept, it’s just how it is, and there is no doubt that plenty of people from that world are relying on these things themselves to one extent or another.

Mobile apps have captured much press and imagination this week, as Google has unveiled its App Inventor project, but Conduit is reminding everyone that web apps are big business.

The company has announced that its network has grown to over 250,000 app publishers & 170 million users, with adoption of apps by end-users increasing 233% between last July and last month.

Update: Reddit is already calling the effort a triumph and says, "We’re getting a much-needed cash infusion."

According to MediaFinder, which claims to be the largest online database of U.S. and Canadian publications, 90 magazines were launched in the first half of 2010. That is way down from 187 titles launched during the same period in 2009.

YouTube has partnered with PBS NewsHour on an interview with Bob Dudley, President and CEO of BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization. This is a chance for people and organizations to ask questions related to the oil spill and get responses from BP.

Google has made some changes to the Google News homepage.

"There’s an old saying that all news is local," says Google’s Kevin Stolt. "But all news is personal too—we connect with it in different ways depending on our interests, where we live, what we do and a lot of other factors. Today we’re revamping the Google News homepage with several changes designed to make the news that you see more relevant to you."

This video pretty much sums it up:

MSNBC.com is rolling out a redesign of its site that has raised a few eyebrows. The reason for this is the shift in focus from pageviews to user engagement. The site has moved to a one-page format, and has traded in banner ads for a different approach.

Along with many other features Bing has launched this week, it has revamped Bing News, which now includes some new features.

For one, you can set your local hometown to get headlines from. Google has let you do this for quite some time, but Bing hasn’t, and now it does. Although you can include multiple locations in your Google News mix if you wish.

Google has launched a new advertising news resource called simply "Google Ad News." It’s a site that is powered by Google News and various ad-related categories you can choose feeds from.

There is a rumor that has been floating around the web for a few days (apparently starting at Italian newspaper La Repubblica) that Google is working on something called Newspass, which would let users pay for news content across multiple publications that charge for content – another way for publishers to get paid and still utilize Google (Google already has a few ways).

YouTube’s CitizenTube, the citizen reporting site that will power YouTube’s news feed, has posted some videos of riot footage from after the Lakers won the NBA championship. 

Footage includes fire and explosions. Insanity:

SF Weekly ran a story yesterday evening about YouTube having a "top secret news experiment" involving citizen journalism and "going local in San Francisco".

YouTube announced today that it is testing a new feature called the YouTube News Feed, which it is working on with the University of California at Berkley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The feature would track news as it breaks on YouTube.

Update: Journalism Online tells WebProNews it cannot reveal its publisher partners at this time, due to confidentiality agreements.

Original Article: News Corp. announced today that it has acquired Skiff, and that it has made an investment in Journalism Online, LLC.