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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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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. 11, 2024 / Gideon Lichfield

The media becomes an activist for democracy — It’s time for American journalism to rewrite its own job description. The model used to go like this: Bad things happen. Journalists reveal them. Voters demand change. Politicians respond by reforming institutions....

Dec. 11, 2024 / Marlon A. Walker

Embracing influencers as allies — A friend recently shared a social media post about a political scandal rocking Jackson, Mississippi. The post caught my attention because it drew on reporting work done by The Marshall Project’s local journalists t...

Dec. 11, 2024 / Meredith Artley

Action over analysis — They say that defining the problem is the key to finding the solution. Much work for many years has gone into articulating the many problems confronting journalism and the media. These problems include: A lack of trust i...

Dec. 11, 2024 / Matthew Pressman

The New York Times will hire a pro-Trump columnist — In January 1973, two months after Richard Nixon’s resounding election victory, the New York Times announced that it was adding a new columnist to its opinion pages: William Safire, a speechwriter for Nixon and his ...

Dec. 11, 2024 / Doris Truong

Watch your language — As we enter the new year, journalists need to reassert vigilance about the words we use and whether our choices play down the severity of conditions other humans face. Too often, the humanity of our sources gets diminish...

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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