Â鶹Éç

If you are one of the growing number of people who use a mobile device to access Â鶹Éç News, we have some important news for you.

This week sees the start of a revamp of our mobile services to make them even simpler and quicker to use, and to make more content available, more easily.

Mobile has become a key way for many people to keep up to date with news. In an average week, for example, the Â鶹Éç News site and apps are visited byÌýabout 9.7m users on mobile and tablet devices worldwide, or about 26% of total users to Â鶹Éç News Online.

To date, there have been three options for accessing Â鶹Éç News on a mobile. The experience you get varies considerably depending on which one you use:

1) The first, and oldest, mobile option is the "mobile browser" site - mostly comprising headline links and designed for the simpler mobile handsets which predated the arrival of smartphones.

2) The second is the Â鶹Éç News mobile app, which has been downloaded from the Apple and Android app stores several million times and is designed to give quick access to the day's main stories. The app allows you to read them offline too, and is a handy way to catch up with the top stories fast, but doesn't contain all the related editorial material you would find on the main site.

3) The third is the full desktop website, which many people also access on their phones. This has the advantage of giving you everything the main website contains, but on a smallish mobile screen it can be hard work to pinch, zoom and scan the content.

Now we are simplifying some of the above into a and replaces the earlier mobile browser site.

Using an approach called Responsive Design, the Â鶹Éç Future Media product team for News have built a mobile site which can detect and adapt to your device, giving you the optimum size and format for the phone you are using.

This new site is designed, for now, mainly for simpler phones, although you should be able to access it on any device. It will gradually evolve as new features and functionality are added in coming weeks, to the point where it becomes the default browser for smartphones as well. For those using our apps, of course we'll keep them up to date too and continue to look for ways of developing and improving them.

Kate Milner, product manager working on Â鶹Éç News for mobiles, explains here in more detail what the new mobile service has to offer, and what to expect next.

People sometimes talk about a "mobile first" view of digital development and this project is a step in that direction, since the underlying technology, design and editorial approach is likely to help shape the way we develop services for tablets and the main desktop site in future too. Chris Russell, who leads the product team, writes more about this here.

We hope you'll like using the new mobile site, and If you'd like to leave comments and feedback about it, or have questions, please post them here.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the Â鶹Éç News website.

Today we're launching a new feature on the offering a way for users to personalise the updates they see from us according to the topics, people or programmes they're interested in.

Ìý

We've called it the Control Panel and we've introduced it as a result of the significant changes we've seen in the way people access Â鶹Éç News Online, as my colleague Gareth Owen, Product Manager of the Â鶹Éç News website, explains on the Internet Blog.

So what's changed?

In fact, the core offering on the Â鶹Éç News Facebook page isn't changing. We're still offering the same mix of the biggest news stories and our best features and analysis for you to click on, comment on, like and share.

But now, when you choose to "Like" our page, you'll see a control panel of options - see the example on this page - that allows you to choose to see updates in your Facebook news feed from your favourite Â鶹Éç correspondents and programmes, and the latest headlines on subjects you're most interested in.

Even if you've already liked Â鶹Éç News on Facebook, you can still access the Control Panel on the left hand side of the page.

For now, you'll mostly see short headline updates via your Control Panel choices, but longer posts might be added to the mix from time to time where we want to highlight our best stories or features. Clicking a link will take you to see the full details on the Â鶹Éç News website.

We hope you enjoy using this new feature. Please let us know what you think - leave a comment on this accompanying post or send us your feedback. We'll read as much of it as we can as part of our work on the next stages of development.

Chris Hamilton is social media editor for Â鶹Éç News. You can find him on Twitter

Â鶹Éç correspondent Paul Wood and cameraman Fred Scott have been reporting on the situation in the Syrian city of Homs. There they have found harrowing accounts of people fleeing the fighting with accusations of atrocities by the Syrian security forces. (You can read Paul's latest report here.)

Ìý

It's the second trip Paul and Fred have made to the Homs area within a matter of weeks. They were there in early February reporting from the city under siege. Since then, the Syrian security forces have launched an all-out onslaught to take control. It was this fighting that claimed the lives of Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik and injured others who had become trapped in the besieged city.

It has been suggested that such deployments are not worth making, and we should not put the lives of journalists at risk when there is so much material provided by local Syrians. Some say such deployments are driven by the spirit of competition in the news business, and that there is too much focus on the bravery of the journalists rather than the plight of the Syrian people, who cannot get across the border to a comfortable hotel in Beirut.

These are all good arguments which should be considered when planning such a trip as the one Paul and Fred have undertaken. As far as the risk to the team is concerned, it comes down to the question: "What is the editorial value in such a risky venture, and is it worth the potential loss of life or injury that may result?"

Obviously we do as much as we can to ensure they will not get hurt. We look at what the risks might be:
• getting injured or killed in fighting
• being specifically targeted because they are journalists
• being arrested by the Syrian forces.

We try to minimise as many of these risks as we can. But of course it is not possible to eliminate every risk, as the team themselves know only too well.

Marie Colvin

So why do individual journalists do it, and why are these ventures supported by their editors?

This weekend, the Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy, injured in the attack which killed Marie Colvin, paid tribute to her by describing her as one of the "greatest observers" of her time.

This seems to me to sum up why it is important that news organisations that are trusted by the public and do not have a political agenda should continue to try to put their reporters on the ground.

The purpose of reporting is to provide evidence and to interpret on behalf of viewers, listeners and readers.

Paul and Fred have filed horrendous reports of people fleeing from terrible atrocities. They do need to be verified, but if true, journalists are playing a vital role in ensuring we know what is going on there.

Fran Unsworth is head of Newsgathering at Â鶹Éç News.