Flipboard Says That It Really Wants to Help Publishers, Not Take Advantage of Them

By: Mathew Ingram | Gigaom

There’s been a kind of lingering tension between online publishers and Flipboard ever since the service first launched in 2010, but that tension broke into the open last week, after Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall said that he thought Flipboard and similar services were a “scam” against publishers — and that he would no longer be putting the full version of his content on those platforms.

Marshall’s views about the relative merits of playing ball with such services seemed to strike a chord in the online media business, judging by some of the comments on Twitter and in the comment section of the post I wrote about it — although he has somewhat tempered his views about the “scam” aspect of these services in an update he posted after speaking with Flipboard founder Mike McCue.