“Our readers have always preferred the Economist in print because it is a lean-back, immersive reading experience,” said Oscar Grut, the Economist’s managing director of digital editions. “The internet has not been a threat so far, because it cannot replicate this reading experience.”

via Mark Sweney, Economist launches iPhone and iPad apps | Media | guardian.co.uk.

Designer Craig Mod, in a letter, told me his “goal was to try and produce one of the best RSS experiences out there.” It’s accomplished via features like those listed below and more, as seen in these screenshots Craig sent me from his pre-launch tests:

• auto-small caps

(more…)

Longreads is off to a good start in the new year. The site has more than 12,000 followers on Twitter and several publications, including The New Yorker, The Believer and The Awl, have been using the Longreads tag on Twitter to highlight some of their work. It’s a way for users to find and mark a story they would like to read and a natural complement to tablet applications like Flipboard and Instapaper that create a clean, clear graphic interface for text.

(more…)

[A]t the end of the day, it’s just one more example of marketer as media, something Mr. Shepard says, for better or worse, is becoming more common.

“I don’t know that all brands can aspire to be a media outlet that’s relevant to the agency community,” Mr. Bryan said. “But multichannel brands that have a footprint physically and digitally can very much be media. (more…)

NYTimes.com now provides anchor links or “deep links” to specific paragraphs: to the URL for an article or blog post, you can add a hash mark (#) followed by the letter p and the number of the paragraph you want to link to.

via Michael Donohoe, Swiping, Linking and Highlighting: A Few New Features – NYTimes.com.

Soylent’s three current features are called Shortn, Crowdproof, and the Human Macro:

• Shortn: Ever write 1,700 words and blow right past your 1,200 word count? Shortn lets writers submit passages of text to MTurk for trimming. They can determine how much they want to cut with a handy slider tool.

(more…)

When M.I.T.’s Technology Review approached Arment with this contention, he responded: “If ads do get removed by the text parser, it’s not as bad as some initially may assume: since each customer saw the complete page on the publisher’s site before clicking Instapaper’s Read Later bookmark, they already viewed the ads on the page,” according to Arment. (more…)