The Wall Street Journal is getting into the (non-profit) business of secure, anonymous document submission. Today they launched SafeHouse, their version of the electronic drop box, similar to WikiLeaks. Few issues have elicited a stronger response – on both sides …

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. have long conveyed a disgruntled outlook on news aggregation. It wasn’t that long ago when there were stories everywhere about the company blocking access to its content from news aggregation sites, and the never-ending verbal sparring with Google over the issue. 

Dow Jones & Company said today it has launched The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition for consumers.

According to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Google plans to launch a store where it will sell online business software for use with its own Google Apps products. The Times cites "a person familiar with the project" and the Journal cites "people briefed by the company."

Update: VerticalResponse CEO Janine Popick has written a separate piece adding 10 more reasons.

MySpace, The Wall Street Journal, and the World Economic Forum, are giving a MySpace user the chance to be a citizen journalist at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland.

The MySpace Citizen Journalist winner will be chosen by a panel of experts and will join the Davos press corps using MySpace to report on the conference news and interview world leaders about relevant issues. This year the contest is expanding to include entries from users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

After all is said and done Rupert Murdoch may still be seen as the sly old fox that really knew best. Many bloggers and journalists have pounded the insanity of Murdoch’s suggestion that News Corp publications might strike an exclusive indexing deal with Bing and delist itself from Google’s search engine.

Wikipedia is a very useful site for anyone looking to find information on any given topic. Chances are that you have used it for research at one time or another. Even if you don’t start by going directly to Wikipedia, results from the site are often at the top of search results in Google, and you’ll get there anyway.

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google’s cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different.

As you’ve more than likely heard by now, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in an interview last week talked about the possibility of blocking search engines from indexing News Corp. publications’ content. While this may or may not actually happen, it is one of the latest (and biggest) examples of a publisher taking the position of search engines hurting them rather than helping them.

Just when eBay thought they had moved Skype, the Wall Street Journal tells us “Not so fast!” A copyright suit has been filed in Northern California by the founders of Skype over the use of a technology by Skype. The license to continue its use ended in March and since then the founders of Skype and the flounders that bought it have been duking it out in a the UK which has already cast doubt on the deal.

It’s been eight months since TechCrunch announced that they would no longer honor embargoes, with several other sites jumping on that bandwagon in the interim. One of the issues here was undermining the credibility of the blogosphere at large. As Trisha Lyn Fawver put it,

Earlier this year, Google laid off about 200 employees in the sales and marketing department. Head of Sales, Tim Armstrong also left the company to become CEO of AOL. Armstrong then got Senior Google sales executive Jeff Levick to go with him.

We’ve seen newspaper publishers forbid employees from accessing social networks before. The Wall Street Journal is not restricting access, but they are restricting how social networks are used by their employees.

The Wall Street Journal Online will reportedly be launching a micropayment model for content this fall. Some other news publications appear to see this is a brilliant move, but asking people to pay for content on the web will draw its share of skepticism.

WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson says, "It’s a payments system — once we have your details we will be able to charge you according to what you read, in particular, a high price for specialist material."

 As I looked through the 

Update: In an interesting turn to this story, the New York Times has eliminated 993,000 article pages as it rolls International Herald Tribune (IHT) into the NYT site. Instead of redirecting the articles to the same article on NYT, they all simply go now to one landing page.

You’ve heard endless rumors, speculation, and theories as to how Twitter will monetize itself. Biz Stone has now confirmed Twitter will be launching its own fee-based services this year after watching others make money of Twitter themselves. The Wall Street Journal Reports:

If you would just read the last post I did you would see a report that touted the continued growth of online marketing despite the economy as reported by CMO’s of 518 companies. That’s so yesterday though. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Market Research Group IDC reports a different point of view. Or is it?

Could the enormous amount of content on the web be hurting online advertising revenue? That is exactly what is happening according to the Wall Street Journal.

The largest contributor to this is probably user-generated content. With everyone and their mother pushing out content (like the incredible number of videos of some guy playing guitar in his room on YouTube) with incredible frequency, the market is becoming saturated.

Newspapers and traditional media are bleeding profits and jobs. It’s one of the hardest hit sectors, so it’s not as if they couldn’t see this coming. But News Corp’s CEO Rupert Murdoch says it’s even worse than he thought. The company just announced they are writing off $8.4 billion of losses.