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Circa

Key links:

Primary website:
cir.ca

Primary Twitter:
@circa

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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Circa is a mobile-only app for reading news that presents stories as collections of facts from various sources.

For its focus on presenting news the way readers want it on their phones—in short chunks, added to as a story changes—Circa has been hailed as an example of the “post-article” news world. Its minimalist design breaks stories up into pieces easily viewable on a phone screen. Users can follow stories of interest and receive updates as new facts, statistics, or images are added. Circa relies heavily on aggregation while using editors to string together the content.

The app was founded by Cheezburger Network’s Ben Huh and launched in October 2012. It released an updated focused on breaking news a year later.

By June 2013, the company employed 14 people producing 40 to 60 stories every day.

Peers, allies, & competitors:

Summly, Storify, Quartz, Flipboard, Upworthy

Recent Nieman Lab coverage:

Dec. 20, 2016 / Andy Rossback

The year of the user — Five years of chasing clicks has made browsing the news one of the worst user experiences on the Internet. Depending on the size of the homepage takeover, it can be hard to tell if you’re looking at a slot machine or a...

Dec. 20, 2016 / Nicholas Quah

Hot Pod: Smart speakers, TV adaptations, newsier podcasts, and other things to watch for in 2017 — Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 101, published December 20, 2016. There’s not a lot of big news this week, but there are some chunky ideas to break into! Predictions. It’s that mos...

Dec. 20, 2016 / Ricardo Bilton

At The Atlantic, campaign coverage innovations are finding new life and applications after the election — Regardless of your feelings about its outcome, the 2016 presidential election was unquestionably historic, in large part because how how bizarre and aberrant it often was. This was a reality that become clear to The Atla...

Dec. 19, 2016 / Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel

A rebirth of populist journalism — A prediction is always a commentary on the current situation in disguise, but this year, our disguise won’t fool anyone. So bear with us as we pretend to say something about the future that is pretty much about the...

Dec. 19, 2016 / Amy O'Leary

Not just covering communities, reaching them — Do you know how to get into the feed of a reader who distrusts, or hates, your news organization? Many of us in the digital trenches of news have been engaged in a street fight for human attention for some time now. But ...

All Lab posts on Circa »

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

All Mediagazer posts on Circa »

Primary author: Sarah Darville. Main text last updated: June 13, 2014.

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