What will next year bring? Everyone loves to look into their crystal ball, and we’re no different. So here are our collective predictions for 2013, from books and video to newspapers and advertising.

This is one of a handful of pieces over the next week that looks at what’s coming down the road next year in the various sectors we cover.

Laura Owen

Jeff Roberts

Robert Andrews

Janko Roettgers

Mathew Ingram

Go to page 2 (of 6) on paidContent .

And yet, for all that text, there was very little heft. It detailed problems and offered a few solutions — but at no point did the inquiry really attempt to tackle the deep questions.

Sure, the report recommends replacing the UK’s current system of self-regulation for print media with a new, officially-sanctioned body that’s intended to guarantee freedom of the press while also holding outlets accountable for decisions. Beyond that, however, it feels like there was little to no understanding displayed of how the publishing world is changing — and how that is disrupting the news business it was supposed to investigate.

And this position isn’t just ignorance, either.

It seems to be deliberate.

Robert Andrews had a great blow-by-blow on how inquiry chair Lord Justice Leveson had specifically avoided many of the most important questions that news organizations are trying to address right now.

The world of online publishing, surely the future of almost all the organizations he was looking at, was dismissed with a careless wave. Questions that need answering were ignored: Where do the lines blur between news and not-news? What is the role of social networking? How is information being liberated from its traditional forms? What constitutes an act of journalism? These are topics that pre-occupy many forward thinkers in the media and yet none of these seem to have been dealt with because of the misguided opinion that “most blogs are rarely read as news or factual, but as opinion and must be considered as such”.

In fact, we all know information flows in ways that go way beyond the capability of traditional news-gathering organizations. Newspapers are weak, dying or dead — and those that are not are turning into something very different.

They have been broken by changes in supply and demand, turned upside down by the free availability of information, and knocked sideways by the internet’s ability to crush borders and barriers. And yet here, a huge public inquiry focused on wrongdoing ended up focused one tiny sliver of a much broader industry.

Leveson should have thought hard about the way that change has happened, because it is important to help the press be better in the future. Instead, he abdicated responsibility and focused on problems that already have solutions.

After all, there are many other ways to right the wrongs of phone hacking and invasions of privacy — and I’m not even talking about leaving it to the market to decide. The market’s role as a righter of wrongs is largely mythical: after all, if the market was able to reflect the moral outrage of phone hacking l, it took Rupert Murdoch just a few months between Rupert Murdoch’s decision to kill The News of the World and the launch of a Sunday edition of The Sun, which has already become Britain’s most popular weekend outlet. The market is not a perfect machine: it can be perverted.

No, I mean that there is plenty of legal recourse available. Breaking into people’s voicemail is criminal activity: it can be punished as such (and it is). Wrongly inferring that public figures are pedophiles is something the courts can deal with (and they are).

Instead we got a report that apparently made no effort to understand the deep corruption at the heart of many media organizations, or the pressures on them that encourage unethical behavior. We got a report that seems to believe that trying to control “the press” is the same as trying to control information. We got a depressing, obscurantist read focused on the worst excesses of a dying industry — not something that tried to understand the interplay between different forms of communication.

Agreeing to the new regulatory proposals is the equivalent of a deathbed confession over a crime committed long, long ago. It’s a way to expunge a feeling of guilt by someone who is on the edge of oblivions: it doesn’t make up for the original infraction and it doesn’t make tomorrow any better.

We all crave a better understanding of how those issues play out, because those are the guidelines that help regulate the future. But in the end, the world doesn’t need Leveson, because the world has already moved on.

Afterward, Grimshaw spoke to Andrews in a separate Q&A about the end of print, HTML5, Windows 8 and social sharing.

Watch the full video of the session, embedded below:

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a little addition to the GigaOM navigation bar: Europe.

That’s because from today we’re adding a new channel to the network that brings our coverage of European companies and issues into one place. The idea is to give Europe’s exciting companies and centers of innovation — important global cities like London and Berlin — the same sort of smart analysis, deep context, thorough reporting and insightful coverage that GigaOM gives to their American counterparts.

The fact is that Europe is home to a vibrant technology industry, with world-leading companies in mobile, digital media, cloud technology and e-commerce. We’ve been covering it increasingly over the past year, but now it’s time to bring it all together.

Our coverage here will be both wide and deep, ranging across our core subjects like startups, media, broadband, mobile and emerging technology, all from a distinctly European perspective.

So why now?

I’ve written before about how Europe has changed over the past few years, and a few months ago Om documented some of the exciting developments taking place.

Ultimately, we believe that not only is there an under-covered base of businesses in Europe, but there is also a new generation of international startups and digital companies being built here — and that the changes happening as a result of this shift deserve the kind of attention we can give it.

To get us there, I’m being joined by a fantastic team.

Robert Andrews, our senior editor, international, joined as part of the acquisition of paidContent earlier this year. Robert, who launched paidContent:UK in 2007, is a veteran with deep expertise, experience and insight. I think his view on the continent’s media businesses, and the disruption they face, is unparalleled — and I’m really excited that he’s part of our team now.

We’ve also hired David Meyer to report on the burgeoning startup scene in Berlin. David, who has been writing for ZDNet in the U.K. for the last few years, joined us a little over a month ago and has been taking on the task of covering his beat with gusto. We think we’re the first major technology site to have a real presence in one of the world’s greatest, most creative cities, rather than just parachuting in, enjoying a little clubbing and currywurst and then heading off again.

We’ll also be supporting our coverage with events, starting with Structure:Europe — the first transatlantic edition of our cloud computing conference — to be held in Amsterdam in October.

It’s going to be great, with top innovators from Europe and Silicon Valley joining GigaOM editors to debate topics such as big data, the cloud and global regulation. We’ve already got some visionary speakers lined up to take the stage, including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Nick Halstead, founder and CTO of DataSift; and JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at SalesForce. More speakers will soon be announced, and pre-registration is now open.

At the same time as doing all this, we will not be turning the European channel into a ghetto, separate from the rest of the GigaOM network. It is precisely because we believe the best European entrepreneurs and businesses can compete on a global basis, that we will be placing the bar for our coverage high.

You won’t find small funding announcements about me-too companies, and we won’t waste your time publishing scurrilous rumors. What you’ll get is our trademark coverage of the ideas, people and companies that are making this region such an exciting place to be right now.

The bottom line: if it’s important and it affects Europe, you’ll read it here.

» Watch the video of McCue’s Q&A with paidContent UK Editor Robert Andrews, embedded below. Full coverage of the conference is available in our archives.

“When something scrolls, you can’t put a full-page ad there,” McCue said. “We want to create a paginated experience. That allows for full-page, print-style ads.

“The web, as wonderful as it is, is not able to render content beautifully, the monetization model has been challenging, it’s not a good experience for readers. Print is flat; it doesn’t move – there’s a lot of good things about that.

“Don’t have infinite inventory,” McCue told advertisers in the audience. “There should be scarcity to the inventory. Sell to the people who are buying print ads from you.”

Over the past few months, the company has introduced ads through deals with publishers like Condé Nast. Flipboard runs content from links via companies’ RSS and Twitter feeds — not publishers’ websites. McCue, who professed a great love of print magazines, made the distinction between interactive ads and digital ones and why Flipboard tends to avoid typical online formats.

“Interactive ads have drawbacks — you don’t want to wait for the long download time if you’re reading feeds in real time,” he said. “When we came up with our ads, we thought, ‘Let’s do a blend — we’ll take an image of a print ad that will be repurposed for RSS feeds. Now, you can also go to a full HTML5 website ad, which opens within the app. And if you’re a digitized magazine replica sold in Apple’s iTunes Store, you can have interactive ads downloading in the background within the iTunes Store. But we believe we have the best of both worlds.”

So how effective have Flipboard’s ads been? The evidence is mostly anecdotal and internal, so far, McCue told Andrews.

“When I talk to people, so far, no one has complained about a terrible experience,” McCue said. “Just the opposite. People go out of their way to tell us they like it. We did a study where we found that people are having the same brand lift as print or 30 percent better.”

In terms of product rollouts, don’t expect Flipboard to be on a lot of different devices anytime soon. The company concentrates on one particular item at a time. And lately, it’s been consumed by creating an iPhone version (finally). He declined to offer a time frame in terms of when the iPhone app would be ready, saying only that he believes it will be soon.

“It’s all hands on board to create the iPhone app,” McCue said. One of the reasons it’s taken so long to build is that the company doesn’t just want a shrunken version of its iPad-only app. “People use our app in the morning and before bed; those are our heaviest times,” he said. “People use their iPhones while standing in line at *Starbucks*. So it’s a different experience and the product has to account for that.”

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Audience tweets clearly were against the case for charging. Reuters’ blogger Felix Salmon applauded an apparent admission from The Atlantic’s Smith: “Go Justin Smith! Admitting that general-interest ideas-based brands can’t charge for content online.”

Not exactly the last word on the matter, but it certainly demonstrates that not everyone believes paywalls will save publishers.

In this video, I ask the Financial Times’ lead online product manager Stephen Pinches about the the paper’s video strategy, which gets over a million monthly views from publishing over 200 videos a month…

“It’s certainly not a given that video should be free. Some of the most valuable content we produce is video content – we see that in the engagement but also the premium advertisers put on it.

“The challenge is for us to balance the strong growth we’ve seen in advertising revenue on video with protecting the core business model that we have, which is this frequency-based subscription business model. I think we’re going to see to at least some of that video behind the paywall, but it’s going to be a gradual thing, coming over the next few months.