“Right now our users are spread across Twitter, our website, Instapaper, Readability, and Kindle. The idea behind the app is to help people avoid finding our link on Twitter, following it to the website and then saving the story to Readability. They can do all that just by opening the app,” said Lammer.

The company is still mostly the two co-founders, Lammer and Max Linsky. They built the app with the help of a developer in D.C. and have expanded their editorial staff to a core group of about a half dozen. “We’re profitable now, thanks to ads and sponsorship on the website,” said Lammer. “The last few months have seen around 66% growth in our traffic.”

So far the startup has maintained good relationships with the publishers it relies on for reading material. The iPad app automatically takes users to the publishers web page first, meaning they get all the benefits of a page view for their advertisers. A simple toggle strips those out using the Readability API. “Right now, all we’re focused on is creating the best reading experience possible. But it’s important to us that the app is a great opportunity for publishers, too, and we’re totally up to work with them to make sure their own advertising is effective within Longform,” said Linksy by email.

For now the company isn’t interested in trying to accelerate its organic growth. “We talked to a bunch of venture capitalists and they had some ideas for how we could proceed that they might fund. But what we’re doing right now, that’s kind of exactly the thing we want to do,” said Lammer.

VentureBeat is proud to announce the two newest members of our writing staff: Meghan Kelly and Chikodi Chima.

Meghan joins our team after a stellar four-month internship in our San Francisco office, where she helped cover new funding announcements as well as write up news about Demo alumni. A new reporter, Meghan has absorbed VentureBeat’s ethic of aggressive, fact-driven reporting and speed. After doing the job of a reporter for several months, it was an easy decision to promote her into that job officially.

Meghan is a southern belle from Yonkers, New York. She’s a graduate of George Washington University, and is the caretaker of VentureBeat’s office cactus, aka PlantBeat.

At VentureBeat, she’ll be covering startups, security and “telling the story of awesome from coast-to-coast.” She’s interested in learning more about how people’s brains tick in relation to the things (and companies) they’ve created. Follow her on Twitter @meghankel, or email her at meghan.kelly@venturebeat.com.

Chikodi comes to VentureBeat after a stint at The Next Web. He’s also contributed to a green tech news startup, helped out with TED India, traveled to Brazil (from where he first wrote a freelance piece for VentureBeat), and is involved in the production of a documentary film.

Chikodi is a multitalented multimedia reporter (check out his short video on beards in Philadelphia), and impressed us with his eagerness to cover Silicon Valley and startup culture.

He’ll cover emerging technologies, startups, investing, cleantech and online communities for VentureBeat. He once hitchhiked from San Francisco to Seattle, and has sold alarm systems for a living.

He received his M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a concentration in digital media. Follow him on Twitter @chikodi or email him at chikodi@venturebeat.com.

We’re not done hiring yet, either. We’re looking for talented reporters in San Francisco and New York. And we’ll be looking for a new intern, too, since we just promoted ours. We need someone hungry to break the news, eager to find needles in haystacks of emails and financial reports, and willing to learn the ropes at a fast-paced, fact-based news startup. Is that you? Write to us.

A lot has changed since I first made it to Silicon Valley a little more than a year ago.

But one thing has remained constant: the ruthless competition for discovering and reporting the best news stories. Among those competitors is TechCrunch, one of the most efficient and tenacious tech news publications in the valley.

Michael Arrington stands — or, stood, rather — at the center of that team. His personality and potential conflicts of interest have generated a lot of discussion. I’m not going to comment in on either of those observations, because I’ve only personally experienced one of his sides in my short time here: He is a ruthless, relentless reporter, regardless of the environment.

Watching Arrington on stage at the company’s yearly conference in San Francisco, TechCrunch Disrupt, is like watching a boxing match. He’s constantly on the offensive and trying to get his speakers to admit to something. Some get away unscathed, but others will inevitably cave to his pressure — such as Digg founder Kevin Rose disclosing his sale of shares in micro-blogging site Twitter. I almost take it for granted that any event where Arrington takes the stage will generate some news.

On Thursday, Arrington left the tech news publication he founded in 2005. It put a bit of a damper on the whole show, and nowhere was that more apparent than the TechCrunch team itself. The news was all over their faces, and you can see it in some of the photos from the show. (Pictured on the right are TechCrunch writers MG Siegler and Alexia Tsotsis.)

“TechCrunch has to start a chapter of its new life, and that’s a life without its founder Michael Arrington,” TechCrunch chief executive Heather Harde said on stage at the show. “TechCrunch, like most startups, has really been operating like a closely knit family, the loss we feel is great, even as we embrace Erick (Schonfeld) as our new editorial lead.”

Disrupt was born from the same philosophy that TechCrunch and Arrington always embodied: Find the most disruptive companies in the valley (and soon the world) and tell the rest of the public about it. While Silicon Valley always seemed like the birthplace of disruption, there were an astounding number of international companies present at this year’s Disrupt.

And they were all there to see Arrington and the team that he’s able to assemble. It was quite the star-studded cast: Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Marissa Mayer, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, April Underwood… the list keeps going on. That doesn’t even count the ridiculous number of investors present at the show. Even an outsider like myself can appreciate the incredible force Arrington was able to gather at this year’s show.

It’s already hard to imagine both TechCrunch and its yearly Disrupt show without Arrington.

“We all need to appreciate what, exactly, Arrington has done here today and in his five years at TechCrunch,” super-angel investor Ron Conway said. “He has really set the bar for everyone.”

Arrington has gone on to start an early-stage $20 million investment fund called the CrunchFund. It was a natural evolution for Arrington to take, seeing as he was already an angel investor.

However, it was the breaking point for Arrington as a blogger. Starting CrunchFund was the move that made Arrington too conflicted to be a credible reporter any more, no matter how aggressively he pursued the facts or disclosed his investments.

Granted, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong didn’t help things with his ham-handed approach to manning publicity for the CrunchFund, for which AOL is a large investor in (and said to be the majority investor). Armstrong confused matters and outraged TechCrunch’s other writers by saying that TechCrunch was “an exception to the rules.”

Except there are no rules in journalism. There are directives: Be aggressive, be tenacious and report the facts. The reader will decide to which level you achieved all those goals. Any conflict of interest ends up eroding the notion of reporting a “fact” because it raises questions about whether facts are omitted or presented in a different light. That’s a choice the readers make, it’s not a directive the chief executive of a fading media company can shape.

But eventually something had to give — there was no way Arrington could remain at TechCrunch while running the CrunchFund. It doesn’t take a philosopher to see the incredible ethical nightmares that lie ahead for the publication had he continued to write about companies he may or may not have chosen to invest in. Arrington, perhaps, said it best himself when he said: “It’s no longer a good situation for me to stay at TechCrunch.”

That much was obvious.

Arrington has raised many questions about the future of ethical journalism. But he was an integral part in re-making and shaping the coverage of Silicon Valley and, if the buzz at Disrupt this year was any indication, was a net positive force for entrepreneurs in the valley. Give him credit for that much.

So, Michael, as a new reporter just a year out of college and still Silicon Valley semi-outsider, I tip my hat to you.

To the TechCrunch staff and every other journalist still out here on this side of the ethical line: keep fighting the good fight.

Keighley’s story will be available to readers as a $1.99 app for the Apple iPad. It will be an interesting test for journalists who have a long story to tell on a hot topic — Portal 2 is one of the biggest video games of the year and launched on Tuesday — but don’t quite have enough material to make it into a book. And if it takes off, Keighley will get a nice pay day.

The app offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Portal 2, which has been in the works since 2007. Keighley spent more than three years talking to the team. The app takes advantage of the iPad’s large high-resolution display and “pushes video game journalism in a bold new direction, blending interactivity, storytelling and multimedia” to take readers inside Valve, Keighley says. It has in-depth interviews with Valve founder Gabe Newell and the team behind the game. The app has photos, audio clips, 360-degree panoramas, videos, polls and other interactive material.

I used to read Keighley’s “Final Hours” pieces for GameSpot in the 1990s. He used to write 10,000-word stories about how blockbuster games were made. He got away from those magazine-length pieces after he made the move to TV. It’s nice to see him return to that. Keighley has been covering the game industry for more than 20 years. And for those of you who think he looks young, he actually started at age 13.

The new position is the latest step by the social media giant to improve the quality of professional news on its website by advocating the use of Facebook as a reporting and promotional tool for journalists.

Lavrusik will manage the new Facebook Journalists page created last week as well as organize journalism-focused events like the one scheduled at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters April 27.

The motivation for Facebook to improve their relationships with the media could be in part to the company wanting to steal some steam away from microblogging site Twitter, which arguably is a more popular reporting tool for journalists.

“The goal is to build programs that bridge the gap between journalists and Facebook,” Lavrusik told CNN. “Twitter is very public. It’s an informational platform. It’s easy to see the application for news.”

However, there are plenty of other reasons they would want to get more involved with journalists and reporting.

News organizations that directly worked with Facebook experienced a 300 percent increase in referral traffic to their websites, the company points out.

If Facebook became an essential tool for reporting professional news, those numbers would be more sustainable and add stability to Facebook’s high valuation.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the debate is how AOL and Huffington Post executives are describing the thinking behind the deal. The HuffPo, as it’s known, has its roots as a popular, controversial, and left-leaning political blog. But in AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong’s lengthy memo to employees, the word “politics” only comes up twice, and both times in the context of a longer list of coverage areas.

Instead of describing Huffington (who is taking control of AOL’s entire editorial output) as a political pundit, Armstrong said that she’s “a world-renowned topic expert on women’s topics and issues” and that the her site includes “a great focus on women’s content.” This seems to fit with one of Armstrong’s main emphases in The New Yorker’s profile of AOL (subscription required) from earlier this month. New Yorker reporter Ken Auletta wrote:

[Armstrong] also decided to direct more of the company’s focus toward women, whose interests and needs, he believes, are not well served by the rest of the Web. When AOL started redesigning its blogs, it began with the women’s sites, like StyleList.com, AOL Shopping, and KitchenDaily.com. Nearly sixty per cent of all visitors to [AOL’s local news network] Patch are women. On the company page describing its demographics for the sake of advertisers, the first two categories mentioned are “women” and “moms.”

That all sounds great, but critics point out that the two companies are linked less by a focus on women and more by their reputation for less-than-top-notch content. (Perhaps the most amusing criticism of AOL’s content came from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who is an AOL employee himself — he described AOL-owned Engadget as a “plasticized caricature of a real blog.”) Writing at The Daily Beast, the site run by Huffington’s nemesis Tina Brown, Dan Lyons lays out the case that the journalism in the combined company will be mediocre and the advertising prices will remain low.

Personally, I’m not sure if AOL can really turn itself around. But if Huffington can’t save the company, who can? Auletta’s largely skeptical article (his conclusion: “AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does not yet seem to be saving AOL”) suggests that AOL needs someone at the top with a strong editorial vision. Whether or not you like the HuffPo, Huffington has built a site with a real brand, a massive audience, and a profitable business model.

The site, eByline.com, serves as a marketplace for freelance journalists and reporters to showcase their work and offer it up for syndication. Reporters can set whatever price they want for their work. Publishers can then pick and choose from individual stories and pay the reporter directly without having to set up any kind of subscription. eByline then takes an 8 percent cut of the transaction.

Not everyone can jump on the service as a freelance journalist, though. eByline requires that potential freelancers have samples of paid freelance reporting work from within the year prior to joining the service — commentary writing, which is what many leisure bloggers do, doesn’t count. Freelancers have to provide clips as well as have some educational background, although the site doesn’t specify what level of education is required. Reporters also need referrals from an editor or news organization and must be U.S. citizens (“due to tax reporting and payment processing”), although it looks like the service might be working to expand beyond that last restriction in the future.

Publishers can also sign up to distribute their content and can set their stories to be distributed under embargo if they choose. On this front, eByline is taking a crack at the major wire services, which provide a lot of content to daily newspapers and other news publications across the world. The major services — like Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones — all provide content as part of a subscription. eByline hopes to buck that trend by providing content á la carte.

The Los Angeles, Calif.-based company was founded in 2009, but the service officially launched last month. Its partnered content publishers include ProPublica, business entertainment news magazine Variety, and some independent news publications like The Texas Observer. It has four employees.

AOL has gotten a lot of ink

Few have heard of Clarity Digital Group, the owner of Examiner.com and a property of Denver-based The Anschutz Company. But that may change as news of its success spreads. Started in the spring of 2008, Examiner.com now has 19 million unique visitors a month and 54 million page views a month for its local news and reviews.

“There is a lot of talk about AOL and how they are doing cover local communities with Patch,” said Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital. “We feel like we are already there.”

While there are some professional news journalists producing material, most of its is produced by 55,000 amateur writers who know the local neighborhoods that they’re writing about. It’s applying the concept of crowdsourcing, tapping the wisdom of the masses, to journalism — though in Examiner.com’s case, the amateur writers are all paid based on ad revenues and measures of engagement with their stories.

The rush is on to claim the turf of hyperlocal news and advertising, where billions of dollars are at stake. Newspapers are dying, yet no one has come to replace them in local online markets. Examiner.com deliberately avoids the role of being an online newspaper, whose role is more like being the watchdog of a community. Rather, Brody sees his company’s role more as reinventing the town square.

“We want to connect those who are passionate about their own community,” he said in an interview.

While national and global audiences have been aggregated by the likes of CNN, Yahoo, and Google, nobody really dominates hyper local, which is the opposite of a mass market and which is defined by its neighborhood focus where the content is created by locals and consumed by locals. As mentioned, billions of dollars are spent in hyperlocal venues, but big corporate advertisers find that the customers hard to reach. That’s because it’s like trying to become a millionaire by picking up all the pennies in a field.

One big difference is that newspapers hire journalists while Examiner.com hires examiners. Examiners are local experts, usually not journalists, who are passionate about subjects such as pets. They are not the conscience of the community, but a reflection of it, Brody said. They could post about local dog parks or write restaurant reviews. They are paid based on a complex formula that includes how many page views they get, how many views come from local readers, and how much users are engaged with their posts, said Rick Blair, chief executive of Clarity Digital. Most of the examiners do not make a living on their posts, but view the work as an avocation. For instance, a former New York Times writer is an examiner focused on cycling in New York City.

“We give the examiners a platform for their passion and they find that very rewarding,” Blair said. “The more exposure and recognition they get, the hapier they are.”

It seems to be working. The company started with just six markets covered by 100 examiners. Clarity Digital got funding from telecom billionaire Phil Anschutz, who owns the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Examiner. (Aside from having an investor in common, Examiner.com is not related to those news properties, which operate on their own domain names.)

With Anschutz’s backing, it was able to patiently add new markets. Now the company serves 238 markets in the U.S. and Canada. Some 150 cities were added this year.

In Los Angeles alone, the company has 2,000 “examiners,” its name for its local writers. That’s larger than the journalist staff of the Los Angeles Times. During the recent Los Angeles fires, one examiner who had firefighting skills was blogging and fighting the fire at the same time.

About 35 percent to 45 percent of the network’s examiners are active in a given month. On average, they write six or seven articles a month. Over time, that has added up. Examiners produce 3,500 articles a day, and the archive of articles is 1.5 million on everything from where to find parking in Chicago to good places to eat in Los Angeles. Blair said the company’s core competency is recruiting good examiners and grooming them.

While these writers aren’t doing investigative journalism, they aren’t paid shills either, Blair said. He actually approached major advertisers to see if they wanted to pay writers to produce articles about their goods and they said they wanted genuine work. Advertisers may sponsor campaigns such as a major series on pets, but the work is not paid advertorial. Advertisers can sponsor an examiner if they want a certain kind of topic covered. The ideal examiner post will produce water cooler talk, not straight hard news.

While the pay isn’t huge (and Examiner.com officials wouldn’t provide details), Examiner.com is now getting 10,000 applications a month fo examiners. It vets each application and accepts about 40 percent of them, after looking at sample stories and writing skills (and doing criminal background checks). The writers can focus on any of 200 categories or subcategories. the writers can look at a dashboard and see how much money they have made in a month.

Examiner.com is making money through local ads, examiner sponsorships, and campaigns that are targeted via Examiner Connect, which combines content creation with social media and search engine optimization techniques. The company did a campaign with pet food maker Iams related to pet adoption. That resulted in much better search results for searchers on the words “pet adoption” and “Iams.” On such campaigns, the competition isn’t as fierce.

Even as it adds examiners, the costs expand only as more revenue comes in, Blair said.

Examiner.com has about 100 employees on staff.

You can read up on Jennifer Preston’s background  in this morning’s entertainingly cruel Gawker post. More important is that the New York Times as an organization takes social networks seriously as a work tool. A leaked internal email describes Preston’s role:

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

@NYT_JenPreston has already taken early feedback: She unprotected her Twitter updates this morning and is now trolling for input on her job. I’m sure 80 percent of that feedback will consist of “you’re an idiot” and “The New York Times will be dead in ____ days/months/years.” Hang in there, Jen. They did this to David Pogue, too.