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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

July 22, 2024 / Joshua Benton

BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source — It’s not often that massive political news breaks on a Sunday afternoon — especially one in steamy late July, the leading edge of the Greater August vacation season. But break news Joe Biden most certainly did wi...

July 22, 2024 / Julia Barton

In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question — After yet another day reading about audio industry layoffs and show cancellations, or listening to podcasts about layoffs and show cancellations, I sometimes wonder, “With all this great audio being given away for free...

July 18, 2024 / Joshua Benton

You’re more likely to believe fake news shared by someone you barely know than by your best friend — Half a century ago, a young Stanford professor named Mark Granovetter published what would become one of the seminal papers in the field of sociology. “The Strength of Weak Ties” argued for the important of m...

July 18, 2024 / Sarah Scire

To find readers for longform investigations, Public Health Watch leans on partners and in-person work — In the natural world, convergent evolution is when two organisms independently evolve to look or behave in very similar ways. The beloved — if endangered and chlamydia-ridden — koala evolved human-like fingerprints d...

July 18, 2024 / Sophie Culpepper

Nearly all local online newsrooms produce newsletters, a LION report finds — How can local online newsrooms best reach, and keep, their audiences? That question keeps many news publishers up at night. In the inhospitable internet climate of 2024, between the ambivalence-to-antagonism of social me...

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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