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Circa

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cir.ca

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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

March 20, 2025 / Sarah Scire

After years of exploring a sale, The Skimm is acquired by Ziff Davis — The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellnes...

March 19, 2025 / Hanaa' Tameez

Report for America’s parent organization will “sunset” its in-house editorial projects to focus on funding local journalism — After a decade at the helm, Charlie Sennott is leaving the GroundTruth Project, the nonprofit journalism organization he founded in 2014 that also launched Report for America and Report for the World. Sennott, a 2006 Nie...

March 19, 2025 / Jordan Teicher

The NBA’s next big insider may be an outsider — Jake Fischer was at a friend’s birthday party when a push notification lit up his phone just after midnight on February 2. His first thought: “That can’t be real.” The incoming tweet from ESPN’s senior NBA insi...

March 19, 2025 / Laura Hazard Owen

The New York Times picks up the shuttered FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking database — When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York T...

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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