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Starbucks announces the launch of the Starbucks Digital Network today. Powered by the free Starbucks WiFi, the digital network offers exclusive content to its in-store customers. Built in HTML5, the content is designed to work on all mobile devices - from notebooks to smartphones.

The network's content includes news, entertainment, business, and health channels, as well as local neighborhood information. Content providers for the network include Bookish Reading Club, Foursquare, GOOD, LinkedIn, New Word City, and The Weather Channel. And you'll be able to get access to special content from The New York Times, iTunes, and WSJ.com, the latter of which normally sits behind a paywall.

Just as the iPad has proven to be a boon to magazine publishers, newspapers have flocked to the device too. All of the major western newspapers have an iPad app now: the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Guardian, USA Today, Financial Times, and others. There are also new forms of news services that have arisen based solely on the iPad's touchscreen interaction and multimedia capabilities: Newsy and Flipboard come to mind.

In this post we'll look at how some of the leading newspapers are using iPad, what the user experience is like, and what could be improved still. We'll specifically look at WSJ, NYT and Newsy.

Newspaper circulation could soon jump wildly, thanks to new standards the industry recommended for itself.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations announced major changes to the way it counts digital readership today that will likely affect media that still rely on print very favorably. The new rules will allow newspapers to count a single subscriber multiple times if he or she pays or registers to access content via a print subscription, website, mobile reader or e-reader edition, among other changes to the way digital access is counted.

The New York Times is currently working on a new metered paywall structure for their online news portal that will limit non-subscribed news readers to a limited amount of stories per day. With the release of some new data from the Pew Research Center yesterday, some wondered if the new paywall would deter bloggers from linking to the Times' content. According to the Times, however, their upcoming paywall technology will exempt readers coming into the site via links from third-party sites.

The New York Times' new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it's an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader's fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer's ability to annotate a story with "raw" information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer's code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

As we profiled in our Never Mind the Valley series last month, New York is increasing its stronghold on the east coast startup scene. The city's rich media and international business ecosystems make it the perfect launch pad for startups looking to leverage these markets. One other reason the city has seen successful growth of entrepreneurship is the holding company Betaworks, which shows no signs of slowing after raising $20 million from Intel, AOL, RRE Ventures and several others.

Known by many as The Big Apple, and by some in the tech scene as Silicon Alley, New York City has been an international hub for media, art and business for decades. More recently New York has ebbed and flowed with the success and failures of the Internet startup culture, and is now well on its way to cementing its reputation alongside Silicon Valley as a driving global force in the industry.

Foursquare has come out strong in recent weeks with partnership deals that look to put it at the top of the location-based app game. Last week, it announced a partnership with Bravo, the style and fashion-centric television network, and today it has come out with a partnership with Zagat, the restaurant guide, and the New York Times.

As we wrote last week, Foursquare is competing in an increasingly crowded space. These partnerships may help it attract a whole new audience and remain competitive against other services like Yelp that are just joining in the location-based arena.