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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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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. 2, 2024 / Hanaa' Tameez

News outlets push vertical video to the homepage — You’ve probably noticed that when you open your favorite news site or app, there’s a lot more video. When Wired had six reporters follow a robotaxi from autonomous car company Waymo around San Francisco, for example,...

Nov. 27, 2024 / Andrew Deck

Core copyright violation claim moves ahead in The Intercept’s lawsuit against OpenAI — Last week, a New York federal judge ruled a key copyright violation claim by The Intercept against OpenAI would move ahead in court. The ruling is the latest in a series of major legal decisions involving the AI develope...

Nov. 26, 2024 / Joshua Benton

Are Americans’ perceptions of the economy and crime broken? — A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. How’s the country doing, overall? Is the economy boo...

Nov. 25, 2024 / Sarah Scire

Remember Nuzzel? A similar news-aggregating tool now exists for Bluesky — The link collection tool Sill is now available to all Bluesky and Mastodon users, the app’s creator Tyler Fisher announced on Friday. If you remember the news aggregator app Nuzzel, you’ll be familiar with th...

Nov. 21, 2024 / Neel Dhanesha

The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang on covering the science and emotion of being human — In recent years I have come to accept the idea that I am in fact little more than a bag of flesh and bones, a fallible body propelled by a fallible brain. Sometimes I deal with my existential malaise by turning to the pa...

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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New Jersey Newsroom is a news website that covers politics and general-interest news in New Jersey. The site was launched in January 2009 by about 40 journalists, many of them veterans of The Star-Ledger in Newark. It is modestly funded by advertising and made up primarily of contributing writers who work on a volunteer basis.

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