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Circa

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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

March 27, 2025 / Sophie Culpepper

How can we reach beyond the local news choir? Spotlight PA’s founding editor has ideas — As LinkedIn post ledes go, Spotlight PA CEO and editor Christopher Baxter’s on a post last week was intriguing: “I recently had lunch with a staunch, pro-Trump Republican and highly successful business leader, and hi...

March 27, 2025 / Joshua Benton

Robert W. McChesney, America’s leading left-wing critic of corporate media, has died — Robert W. McChesney, the lion of anti-corporate media scholarship, is dead at the age of 72. He was, for decades, probably the most prominent academic critic of American media from the left, focused on all the ways our i...

March 26, 2025 / Sarah Scire

“Some hard and important lessons”: One of the most promising local news nonprofits looks back — and ahead — It’s hard not to root for the National Trust for Local News. Heralded as a savior of local newspapers, the nonprofit has presented itself as the ideal foil to the hedge fund-owned chains that slash local newsroom jobs ...

March 25, 2025 / Joshua Benton

Jeffrey Goldberg got the push notification of all push notifications — and a hell of a story — Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — p...

March 20, 2025 / Joshua Benton

There’s another reason the L.A. Times’ AI-generated opinion ratings are bad (this one doesn’t involve the Klan) — In 1964, Philip Converse published what would become one of the most cited papers in all of political science, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”1 It was a result of a movement at the University ...

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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