Q. Why is now the right time to sell Instapaper?

A. “The biggest reason I did it is because I just haven’t been able to keep up. It’s not that I’m having trouble keeping up with competitors or Apple or anything like that. The service has gotten so big now that I’m having trouble just keeping it functioning, fresh and up to date. I knew probably six months ago that I should be starting down this road and it took me awhile to admit to myself… The product has seen incredible growth and has a very loyal dedicated customer base, and I couldn’t address their needs fast enough. It needs a staff, no question.”

Q. What types of features do you hope that Betaworks will add?

A. “I have a lot of half-done major features that Betaworks is going to take to completion. I want to have a fresh new design on the app, new sidebars…so many things I got partially through or didn’t have the time to start. The service has always been about doing the basics really well, not about having a million different features. That’s what I’m looking forward to, going forward — a staff that can keep up with a lot of that stuff.”

Q. What’s next for you? How is The Magazine [the iOS/web magazine that Arment founded in 2012] doing?

A. “I’ve been working on Instapaper for five years so far. I would love the chance to try new stuff out. This has been the only major app I’ve done in the entire iOS App Store…Now I will have time to explore more things beyond just that.

The Magazine is still kind of finding its way. We do experiment a lot with it, and it has a healthy number of subscribers. [But] that’s really not much of a technical project. The app is effectively done. That’s an editorial challenge, so most of the work on that is actually not on me.

[As for my next project], I have nothing to share at this time. I’m going to try a few things, but haven’t quite finalized which of those things will become a product.”

Q. A lot of read-it-later services have popped up in the years since you launched Instapaper. What do you think about the future of the space?

A. ”There’s a new one every few months. The fact is, it really isn’t that hard to make the basics of something that saves links and serves links back to you. It took me one night to be the first person who did that. The challenge with these tools is in all the other features that go along with that — the level of detail and the level of quality that goes with that.

Pocket is one. Readability was on the way, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve been very busy recently. Evernote is making a big entry in this market with almost every feature it adds these days.

Having competition is nothing new, really. What I see hapening in this market is that there are going to be three or four players that make it big, and the rest are just going to be little, lesser-used tools. I don’t really care. Instapaper’s customers choose to use Instapaper because they like it better. The potential for this market is so big, almost everybody who reads on the web can use these tools. You don’t really need to capture a majority of [the market], or even a plurality of it, to succeed.”

A previous version of this article stated that The Magazine is an iPad-only magazine. It is available on iOS and the web.

Unlike Digg at the time it was acquired, however, Instapaper has a business model: It’s a paid product. The iPhone and iPad apps are $3.99, and the Android app is $2.99. Users can also install a bookmarklet to save articles.

On his blog, Arment wrote of the acquisition, “We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.” He said he has been looking for an opportunity to “try other apps and creative projects.”

Betaworks’ acquisition of Instapaper fits with the firm’s strategy of investing in both short and long-form content. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick said at the paidContent conference last week that companies shouldn’t favor one over the other: They need to invest in both. Digg is planning to launch a Google Reader replacement, and Instapaper’s technology could possibly be put to work on that project.

Here’s a video of Borthwick talking to Om Malik at paidContent Live:

As Arment explains in his blog post about the change, the need to open up his magazine’s content more for sharing was brought home by the response to a recent piece he published by Jamelle Bouie on the topic of race and technology writing. As with most of the essays in The Magazine, the writer was free to publish on his own blog as well, which he did — and while The Magazine’s version got plenty of readers, the response to Bouie’s piece after it appeared on his own site was substantially larger:

“We allow authors to republish their articles on their own sites (or anywhere else) just 30 days after we publish them. Bouie did exactly that, as many of our authors have. Only then did his article explode into the huge discussion I suspected may result from it — and The Magazine wasn’t a part of it.”

The magazine was cut off from the social web

The Magazine wasn’t part of this broader web and social-media discussion because Arment initially showed only a short excerpt at the website — as well as a download link for the iOS app — when readers shared a story. As the publisher points out, since his magazine doesn’t rely on advertising at all but gets its revenue entirely from subscriptions, a web presence with full content seemed like a fairly low priority, if not an outright negative. Arment calls this “the biggest mistake I’ve made with The Magazine to date.”

“You’d share a link, and everyone would just see the truncated teaser. Some of them would subscribe and see the rest, but most would get turned off by the truncation and just abandon the effort, as we web readers tend to do. Most people with big followings would quickly realize this and, understandably, avoid linking to our articles.”

This is similar to the problem (one of many) that News Corp.’s iPad-only magazine The Daily ran into when it launched: it didn’t even have a website, per se, so initially users who followed a shared link from a subscriber would get a static page. In the early days of the app, in fact, readers were actually sent to an image of the page from the app — something that was impossible to click on or otherwise interact with. The sharing experience was so broken that many likely never bothered.

Where should the freemium line be drawn?

Arment’s problem is a microcosm of the tension that publishers everywhere are experiencing, from the New York Times to the smallest local paper. While some media companies — including News Corp. with some its British papers — have chosen to go with what are called “hard” paywalls, where virtually no content is provided to readers for free, almost everyone else is trying to find a happy medium between that and no subscription barrier or paywall at all.

The NYT started by providing 20 free articles, and giving anyone who came in via a link on social media a free view, a so-called “porous” paywall approach many other newspapers have adopted. But the paper recently cut the number of free articles in half. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile — who recently launched a standalone blog funded solely by subscriptions — has made virtually of his content free via RSS, but imposed a click-through wall for readers on the site.

The issue for everyone from Sullivan (who will be appearing at our paidContent Live conference in New York in April) and Arment to the New York Times is how much they need to be part of the social web vs. how much they plan to rely on reader subscriptions. A hard paywall essentially means a publication will be supported solely by existing readers, plus a few new sign-ups here and there — but newer or smaller publishers need the word-of-mouth that sharing brings in order to build awareness (and older brands might as well).

As traditional advertising continues to decline in value — something that has taken both the New York Times and the Financial Times to the point where subscription revenue now exceeds advertising revenue for the first time — more and more publishers are going to have to confront this tension between paying and sharing. And in all likelihood, there is no single right answer.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognanni and Shutterstock / Daniilantiq

Since the “democratization of content” that was created by both blogs and social media is fairly well established now, both Svbtle and Medium seem to be focused on the process of curation and design rather than simply giving writers a new place to publish their content. How they are going to monetize this new form of curated blogging remains a mystery, however.

Svbtle was born last March, when designer and developer Dustin Curtis decided to create what he thought was a more elegant and simple way of posting content (interestingly enough, this is almost exactly the same motivation that David Karp has said was behind his creation of the Tumblr network in 2007). And while Svbtle seemed at first like a personal project involving Curtis and some of his writer and designer friends, it has grown fairly substantially, with more than 200 bloggers generating what Svbtle says in its blog post are “millions upon millions of pageviews” a month.

Svbtle admits it doesn’t know how it will make money

Curtis told TechCrunch that he raised the unspecified amount of funding from a group that includes SV Angel, the CrunchFund and New York-based incubator Betaworks (the startup also got some earlier funding through the Y Combinator program) because he wanted to hire developers, but also because he needed a “cushion for experimentation.” Among other things, the Svbtle founder admitted he doesn’t really have any idea how the company is going to monetize the content it is curating on the network.

As Curtis put it in the TechCrunch interview: “Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet.” But he provided some clues in a response on Twitter on Tuesday:

You can't make money in publishing by monetizing the content. You have to monetize the delivery system.

—
dustin curtis (@dcurtis) November 21, 2012

Medium is also focusing on curation and design

In many ways, Svbtle seems to be aimed at the same kind of market niche as Medium, the startup that Evan Williams founded last fall after leaving active duty at Twitter — where he was a co-founder and CEO — along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both of whom were co-founders and/or early staffers at Twitter and Blogger. Reinventing blogging seems like a particularly fitting task for Williams, since Blogger (which was acquired by Google in 2003) was one of the early success stories in what was then a brand-new way of publishing and distributing content online.

And like the Svbtle network, Medium seems to be focusing on the curation process as a way of adding value to the blog market: it is invitation-only, although the company has said it plans to open up to more contributors in the future. And Medium recently hired a content editor, former literary agent Kate Lee, whose job appears to be finding new writers and encouraging them to blog on Medium — as well as perhaps finding ways of distributing that content in other forms such as ebooks. But much like Svbtle, the company hasn’t given many hints about how it plans to monetize its network.

Blog networks like Pajamas Media and others were a staple of the early days of blogging too, but most failed to achieve any kind of actual business success — although some managed to earn advertising revenue through ad networks like The Deck and Federated Media, which was an early backer of blogs like TechCrunch and Laughing Squid. The Huffington Post arguably started in the same way, with a core of unpaid bloggers that eventually became a business, and so did Talking Points Memo.

Can Svbtle or Medium find an alternate route to success, possibly by imitating the “artisanal” approach taken by entities like Marco Arment’s The Magazine, which is iOS-only? That remains to be seen. But one thing seems clear: just when you thought blogging was dead, someone comes along to reinvent it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

Here is an overview of how publishers are re-evaluating their approach to apps, followed by three examples of the new app economy in action.

Getting past the love/hate view of apps

To begin, it’s helpful to recall why apps became so contentious in the first place: they were supposed to be a way for publishers to replicate the glory days of print but with a digital twist. The idea was to deliver pretty layouts plus interactive razzle-dazzle to a captive audience who would read the content (and ads!) just like a magazine or newspaper. This promise, though, fell far short as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Tech Review described with anguished honesty in May.

Pontin explained how his publication expended innumerable staff hours plus $124,000 on outside costs to build apps that yielded a grand total of 353 iPad subscriptions. In doing so, he discovered that app building was not a one-off process but a never-ending struggle to stretch and shape the app across different devices, operating systems and updates. Pontin also came to question the basic premise of a publishers’ app. Specifically, why would readers want to read inside a box that cut them off from the “linky-ness” of the rest of the web?

Pontin, who has since made good on his vow to yank his apps from the Apple store, makes a strong case. So what’s changed since then? A couple of things.

The first is cost. Today, there are a growing number of companies offering off-the-shelf app solutions that let publishers enjoy pretty, serviceable apps on the cheap. These apps are not as “linky” as a web page but do come with the sharing features that are essential in the age of social media. These publishing options mean app-making is no longer the high stress, budget-busting process it was before.

The second, and more profound change, comes in how publishers have come to think about apps in the first place. Today, most publishers accept they need an app. As an Economist executive noted at Business Insider’s Ignition conference this month, his magazine’s strategy is simply to be where the reader is — which includes inside app stores and on the display of a smartphone or tablet. But the choice of what type of app to put there will vary widely depending on the publication.

For news-intense digital publishers that offer lots of links and reader interaction, an app can simply be a proxy for their mobile website. More pensive publications, on the other hand, may decide to invest a little more on a boutique app from a speciality shop. Meanwhile, legacy publishers can turn to app makers to help them slap social or shopping features onto their traditional layouts.

The point is that publishers no longer face the hard choice between betting the farm on expensive apps or risking being left out of the digital future. Instead, apps have become just one more tool of distribution available in an ever-growing number of shapes, sizes and prices.

Example 1: A pretty container for The Awl

The Awl is a literary, cultural and news site whose motto is “be less stupid.” It caters to a young, technophilic audience but is still a shoestring operation with little cash for expensive bells and whistles. But that didn’t stop it from developing a personalized app.

Turning to a New York start-up, 29th Street Publishing, The Awl made an app called the Weekend Companion that delivers five new articles to readers’ iPhone or iPad each week. The app’s appeal is that it curates a small set of articles and presents them in a pretty, immersive layout. The articles download quickly and are ready for reading on a train ride or a rainy morning in bed. While the Awl app has discreet tools to share stories by email or text, the overall idea is not interaction but a reflexive, book-like experience.

“We put content front and center not the app,” said 29th Street Publishing CEO, David Jacobs in a phone interview. The company is working with a dozen or so publishers, including Gothamist, and its pricing models include both fees (one report cites $20,000) and revenue sharing.

Jacobs said apps can provide a better media experience than the web but that he doesn’t perceive conflict between the two platforms; rather, he thinks publishers should be on both. He added that so-called “sub-compact” publishing models like 29th Street and Marco Arment’s The Magazine are best suited for light-weigh text-focused publications.

“You can’t really have a sub-compact fashion magazine,” he noted.

Example 2: Off-the-shelf content shovels for magazines

Sub-compact publishing is a hot topic but it’s not a realistic option for publishers that want an app to mimic the look and feel of a glossy magazine. In the past, these publishers had to build individualized apps at great expense but now they can turn to off-the-shelf solutions.

One popular option is MAZ, a company that provides apps and mobile service for titles like Inc and Bust for $299 a month plus 20 cents per download. According to founder Paul Canetti, MAZ lets editors and reporters take control of the mobile publishing process without having to learn finicky coding techniques. It’s a logical division of labor, in other words.

“I’ve never met a print publisher who made their own layout software or built a printing press — why expect it with apps?” Canetti said in an interview. He added that his clients’ apps were ready the moment Apple introduced its new retina display iPad while the venerable New Yorker struggled to update its house-built app.

MAZ apps also let publishers customize stories with shopping and social buttons. This means readers can buy things they see in an issue or cut out pictures and share them on Pinterest.

The MAZ apps rely on publishers uploading PDF’s so they are best suited to publications that want to reproduce their distinctive print layouts online. Meanwhile, publishers that want a more comprehensive white-label solution may look to companies like Polar Mobile which help sling mobile content across different forums, including apps.

In the long run, the off-the-shelf products may present lock-in risks but, as Canetti notes, the same risk applies to choosing a content manage system. “Publishers trust us not to take advantage of them,” he said.

The bottom line here is that, as external app solutions become more numerous and versatile, the pressure on publishers to create elaborate apps for themselves will diminish.

Example 3: Apps are just a box for the web

For some types of publishers, the rapid evolution of mobile websites has nearly obviated the need for apps altogether. The most prominent example is the Financial Times which grew fed up with Apple’s pricing practices and pulled out of the app store altogether this summer. The strategy appears to be working.

FT.com’s Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told a Business Insider conference this month that traffic on iOS devices was up 70 percent since the FT left the app store, and suggested company is not looking back.

Should everyone else follow suit? Once it again, it depends on the publication. For publications like GigaOM that embody the hyper-connectedness of the web, a mobile site is the best way to deliver that experience. It is perhaps also telling that popular tech aggregator Techmeme doesn’t have an app at all.

But even for publishers that are betting on the mobile web over apps, it doesn’t hurt to have an app all the same for readers who like the idea of a publication’s icon appearing on their devices. That’s why publishers like the FT and GigaOM offer apps that largely mirror their mobile sites but that require little in the way of development costs.

(Image by Everett Collection via Shutterstock)

The massive growth of a site like Tumblr, which is now bigger than Wikipedia with more than 20 billion pageviews a month (something I have argued should make Facebook more than a little nervous) is even more spectacular when you consider the fact that David Karp — who designed a prototype of the service when he was just 19 — didn’t have any intention of creating a gigantic web company that would one day be valued at close to $1 billion and have over 160 million users.

Create something you want or need

As the Tumblr founder said in our interview, all he really wanted was a tool that he could use to post images and thoughts online. There were image-hosting services like Flickr and micro-blogging networks like Twitter and full-fledged blog platforms like WordPress, but nothing that fit what Karp was looking for or was as easy to use as he wanted. So he built it. A number of other founders at RoadMap echoed that sentiment: build something to fill a need that you have, and if you are lucky then lots of other people will have a similar need, and you will have a useful service.

So what is the takeaway for media companies? It’s fine to say that an entrepreneur should focus on filling a need that they have themselves, but where does that leave a traditional media player? You can’t just redesign a newspaper or a newspaper company from scratch (although people like John Paton of Digital First Media and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger are certainly trying hard to do so anyway).

What I think you can do, however, is to think about who your user is and what they want, both when it comes to your traditional product (i.e. a newspaper or magazine) and your digital services or products. This isn’t something most media companies are particularly adept at, just as thinking like a startup and focusing on innovation is a struggle for many — in the past, media companies just pumped out content and more or less relied on captive audiences to subscribe to or consume that content, without thinking a lot about what they wanted from it or how they wanted to consume it.

That’s the kind of thinking that results in me-too digital apps that repackage print content with a few digital bells-and-whistles, rather than really trying to understand what users want when it comes to news or other forms of content on a mobile device. And one of my criticisms of the rush to paywalls is that they don’t allow newspapers to really get to know their readers likes and dislikes.

Who are your users and what do they want?

For an example of the opposite, all you have to do is look at what Marco Arment — a designer who used to work at Tumblr and also runs a service called Instapaper — has done with The Magazine, a digital-only and mobile-only editorial product that he launched recently. There are virtually none of the trappings of a digital magazine that has been ported over from the print world, for the simple reason that Arment created it to be digital-native. And it is almost an artisanal approach to editorial content, since he picks the writers and edits it himself, to fill a need that he felt existed in the market.

Another good example of thinking outside the usual boxes is Circa, which Matt Galligan and Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh (who was trained as a journalist before he got into the web-humor business) started as a way to provide news in a different format that works better on mobile — as a series of edited summaries of stories rather than the usual repurposed print or web content. Whether users respond to this idea or not remains to be seen, but at least it is trying to reimagine how we interact with content in a mobile age, and it is looking carefully at what users actually do with it.

Most traditional media companies are happy doing surveys of readers so they can target them better for advertising, but how often do they actually think about — or ask — what those readers really want when it comes to their product? Have they thought as hard about the features as David Karp did when he decided to replace comments with the reblog button? Or are they just pumping out the same kind of content and putting it in slightly different packages and hoping that it works?

Getting to know their readers (or users) better, and understanding exactly what they want and don’t want, isn’t just something that would be helpful for media companies to figure out — it could be the only thing that is standing between them and extinction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Zert Sonstige

Launching today in iTunes, Arment’s “The Magazine” will showcase top technology writers and ideas, offering four articles every two weeks. The first edition will cover topics like tech writer John Gruber ‘sblog format, geeks and sports and people’s relationship with technology, according to screenshots in iTunes.

To view the Magazine’s Table of Contents requires users to download a 7-day free trial which then turns into an auto-renewal at $1.99. The app is only available to iOS6 subscribers which means those of of us waiting out Maps-Gate will have to hold off. Fortunately, my colleague Erica Ogg was able to procure a screenshot:

In the forward, Arment explores how a legacy concept of a “magazine” should apply in the world of digital publishing and notes that many iPad magazines are carrying unnecessary and expensive baggage from their print days. He invokes comedian Louis C.K. as an inspiration for breaking from conventional distribution models: “Usually, things are done the way they’re done for good reasons. But sometimes, they’re only done that way because nobody has questioned it recently.”

Arment also offers a refreshingly frank summary of his business plan: “My biggest fixed cost is the up-front design and development of the app, and my biggest recurring cost is paying writers. If it doesn’t turn a profit within two months — just four issues — I’ll shut it down.”

The launch also coincides with a newfound interest in long form journalism by web publications, like BuzzFeed and SB Nation, which typically rely on short, snappy formats.

From a strategic point of view, Arment’s new magazine ambitions would seem to be a good complement to Instapaper — his service that lets readers clip long articles they find on the web and collect to read later in a different place or platform.

Beneath all the sound and fury from developers, however, is a kernel of truth that Twitter would do well to consider: namely, that one of the reasons why external apps and services have been — and continue to be — such an important part of the company’s growth and success is that many of its own products are frequently underwhelming at best. If the point of the new API changes is to control more of the ecosystem and the Twitter experience, then the company had better make sure that experience is as good as it can possibly be, or it risks losing the very user base it is hoping to monetize, as others have in the past.

As Harry McCracken notes in a post at Techland, the description of the changes from consumer product lead Michael Sippey does a pretty poor job of explaining what kind of behavior Twitter is in favor of and what kind it isn’t, and it doesn’t really give users any kind of guidance at all when it comes to which apps or services they should feel comfortable using. The confusing table included in the post — with quadrants for different apps and abstract descriptions rather than names — obscured a lot more than it revealed, as highlighted by the fact that many people couldn’t tell whether Storify was one of the “good” apps or one of the bad ones and the director of platform Ryan Sarver was forced to try to clarify that with a tweet.

The new rules have their defenders, including some who argue that Twitter is at least providing some firm guidance for developers, since its attitude toward third-party apps and services has been the subject of a lot of fear and uncertainty. Others have made the point that placing limits on API use makes perfect sense for a company that is trying to generate revenue from its network, as opposed to giving every developer with an app a free ride, and that the limits are not onerous (although Bottlenose founder Nova Spivack argues that Twitter could actually make as much or more money by licensing the use of its API).

But while the limits on API use and the requirements for how Twitter can be used may not look extreme, the message behind them seems to be clear. As entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Dixon put it, ”If you make a Twitter client, you should stop and make something else.” Instapaper developer Marco Arment has a similar view of the changes, saying they are obviously designed to make it difficult for other services to make use of what Twitter sees as its core functionality, to the point where one clause about how tweets must be displayed even appears to threaten popular aggregation apps like Flipboard. As Arment put it:

“Apps cannot interleave chronological groups of Twitter posts with anything else. This is very broad and will bite more services and apps than you may expect. It’s probably the clause that caused the dispute with LinkedIn, and why Flipboard CEO Mike McCue just left Twitter’s board.”

Squashing third-party apps means pain for users

The fact that Flipboard and Tweetbot — a popular mobile client — and possibly even services like Storify are threatened by Twitter’s moves highlights an important point: The company claims that these changes are being made to provide a “consistent user experience,” implying that all it really wants is to save users from irritating or poorly designed services. But the reason why people use apps and services like Flipboard, Tweetbot and Hootsuite in the first place is that they provide something useful that Twitter doesn’t. How does throttling or even extinguishing those kinds of apps help users? Just like the decision to pull tweets out of Google search, users are the ones who ultimately seem to pay for these kinds of moves.

One of the things that makes Tweetbot appealing as a mobile Twitter client, at least to me, is that it is consistently faster and better designed than the official mobile app and has a number of useful features that Twitter’s app doesn’t. As more than one person has pointed out, the company’s mobile web app and even its regular website also leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability, and the iPad app and Mac OS X apps appear to be the redheaded stepchildren of the family: They get few (if any) updates, and in some cases they may not even meet Twitter’s new display and usage guidelines.

It’s true that relatively few people use third-party apps, and so some have argued the developer angst and outcry isn’t worth paying attention to. But if this rationale is taken far enough, it turns into a kind of “we can do whatever we want, and users will have to put up with it” attitude, and that could be very dangerous indeed. As I have argued before, MySpace and Digg are a examples of companies that put the demands of revenue generation and business models ahead of what their users wanted, and they paid the price. They may not have had third-party developers, but the outcome was the same.

In a debate with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who says Twitter is effectively telling developers to “drop dead,” Anil Dash argued that the company’s restrictions aren’t that different from what Apple has done with its app store and developer community. But unlike Twitter, Apple had a successful and attractive platform that developers were clamoring for access to. The platform Twitter is now trying to monetize would not have achieved much of its value if it wasn’t for the developers it is now spurning. Will it have the same value if they leave?

Furthermore, Apple’s focus has also always been on users and the user experience, and its requirements for developers — however draconian they seemed – have stemmed from that impulse. Twitter wants to portray its changes and restrictions in the same way, but it is a much harder argument to buy. It feels as though the company’s need to justify its $8 billion market value is taking precedence over everything else, and developers — and users — are getting caught in the crossfire.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa

Every so often, a controversy erupts over something that seems relatively simple: Namely, the concept of linking to (and thereby giving credit to) the source of a news report. In one of the most recent examples, Instapaper founder Marco Arment — who broke the news about a wave of corrupted apps in the Apple store — kept track of both media outlets that repeated the news and whether they gave credit to him or not. Some did but others didn’t, and some hid their links or otherwise tried to make it look like they broke the news themselves. There are a number of reasons why this kind of behavior is still so common a decade after digital media became mainstream, but none of them justify it. Simply put, linking is a core value of the web, and if we lose that then we have lost something incredibly important.

Arment initially reported on Wednesday that corrupted apps downloaded from the Apple store were crashing repeatedly, something he noticed with his own Instapaper app first and then confirmed was a problem for close to 100 other apps. The news spread quickly throughout the tech blogosphere, but Arment noticed that many outlets were not giving him credit for breaking the news, so he started what he called “Rewrite Bingo” by cataloging the blogs that were duplicating his report.

Time for rewrite bingo! CNET's rewrite, not too bad: news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-5… The Verge's post, better: theverge.com/2012/7/4/31380…

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) July 05, 2012

In some cases, blogs such as CNET gave credit to Arment for the initial report and linked to him prominently, while others linked to one of the first outlets that repeated his news, such as The Verge. Some linked to subsequent reports at other sites without any mention of Arment. And several reports that didn’t initially give credit to him were updated to add a link after the Instapaper founder started tweeting about the lack of credit. Both John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball and Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar pulled together Storify collections of his Twitter stream.

Virtually every blog or media outlet has probably seen similar kinds of behavior, and that includes GigaOM: Our legal expert Jeff Roberts broke a story on Thursday about a patent troll going after the popular travel site Hipmunk, and several outlets covered the same news without providing a link to our post on it. With other stories, including one recent one from Ki Mae Heussner about an Amazon acquisition, outlets such as the Wall Street Journal mentioned her report but failed to link. Although a link was added later after we complained, it shouldn’t take a complaint to get a media outlet to give credit to the original source of the news it is reporting.

Linking is a critical part of web culture

As I argued after a similar incident last year, this kind of linking isn’t just polite: It is also a crucial part of what makes the web function. Whether or not you believe in the value of the so-called “link economy,” giving credit to the sources of the information you used to develop a post or story is a principle that distinguishes ethical outlets from unethical ones. And as David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has pointed out in the past, the ability to link to sources is also a critical element of transparency and something that separates online media from print. As Om has said:

Links were and are the currency of the collaborative web, that started with blogs and since then has spread to everything from Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr. Links are the essence of the new remix culture. It is how you show that you respect someone’s work and efforts. It is also indicative that you are part of a community.

In the days when newspapers ruled the world of information, giving credit to other outlets was (and often still is) discouraged. Rewriting or “matching” a story that someone else broke — or taking wire-service reports and rewriting them a little — was standard practice, and code words such as “one report” were often used so a newspaper wouldn’t have to mention a competitor’s news story. This kind of behavior has spilled over onto the web as more mainstream media outlets have moved online.

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on page views, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend you broke a story. But regardless of whether this inflates reader numbers in the short term, it ultimately depreciates the value of the blog that does it, and that leads to a loss of trust. And trust is far more important than pretending you have a scoop, the half-life of which is now measured in minutes.

But this isn’t just about the media. Despite skeptics like Nicholas Carr, who has argued links interrupt the flow of reading and confuse readers, linking of all kinds is one of the crucial underpinnings of the internet and the web. That’s why the attempt to criminalize links via lawsuits like the one the U.S. government has launched against website operator Richard O’Dwyer (who linked to copyright-infringing video streams), is such a dangerous phenomenon. Links are the lifeblood of the internet, and it is up to all of us to see that we keep them — and the collaborative nature of the web itself — alive.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Skedonk and Robert Brook

– RIM/O2: Not a great week for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. On top of the bad financial results, when the company’s new PlayBook tablet went on sale this week in the UK, one of its named retailers, the mobile operator O2, said it decided against stocking it for now, citing issues with the end-to-end customer experience.

– iTunes Match: A compelling look at how one small label has opted out of Apple’s new cloud-based music matching service, and the argument for how it legitimizes piracy.

– Android tablets: Marco Arment, creator of the reading app Instapaper, rips into a review of the new, bigger Samsung Galaxy Tab to expose some of the biggest problems today for tablet makers…Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) excluded. Original review here.

– Mobile ads: Gartner forecasts that mobile advertising will bring in $3.3 billion in revenues worldwide in 2011, more than double the take in 2010. Maps and search are leading the pack of ad formats in terms of sales.

– Spotify: Hints that the European streaming music service Spotify may finally be getting a launch date for the U.S., according to remarks made at a conference by its general manager, Jonathan Forster.

– Out There/T-Mobile: European mobile advertising company Out There Media has launched in the U.S., and has announced T-Mobile USA as its first key customer: Out There will be powering T-Mobile’s “More For Me” daily deals service, both through its Android app and via offers directly to the handset.