Apture, a San Mateo-based startup founded by three Stanford computer scientists, hopes to improve the links journalists embed in their Web pages. Led by 23-year-old Tristan Harris, who left a master’s degree program at Stanford to start Apture, the company provides a point and click system for publishers to add cross-reference links to their Web pages. Writes April Joyner at Inc.com:

While developing Apture, Harris consulted with journalists in Stanford’s John S. Knight Fellowship program. The company’s investors include Stephen E. Taylor, former executive vice-president of The Boston Globe. (Apture thus far has raised an undisclosed amount, reported by Om Malik at under $1 million, in angel funding.) And its first clients include The Washington Post and the non-profit news organization ProPublica, in addition to the technology blog O’Reilly Radar. Harris believes that Apture is particularly well-suited to investigative journalism online by enabling publishers to share, through technology from the document-sharing site Scribd, primary documents used in reporting stories.