Scribd is giving away a free branded version of its Web-based document reader to select news organizations, including mediabistro.com.

The program lets news organizations solidify their own brand as copies of their documents make their way around the Web. It also is part of a larger strategy on Scribd's part to make its reader the standard for embedding documents in Web sites (much as the Adobe Reader is the standard for reading pdf's today), Scribd Vice President of Content Tammy Nam told BayNewser today.

The first news organizations to get the reader are the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, and mediabistro.com.

How Scribd chose those organizations, and whether they'll be extending the program to other organizations, after the jump.

Nam said Scribd chose the above organizations for the launch because they already had staffers who were active users of the service. Since the announcement of the new program this afternoon, Nam said Scribd has received interest from about 20 other organizations, including some of large media companies.

Nam said Scribd would extend the program to a limited number of other organizations, but perhaps not all applicants, due to resource constraints within the company itself.

Scribd is hoping the program will result in wider adoption of the reader among the public at large and thus, in the long run, solidify Scribd's position as the default tool for displaying and sharing documents on Web sites.

Nam said Scribd would be releasing a second version of the reader, possibly in the first quarter of next year, with features like annotation capabilities and more detailed statistics about document views.