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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

Oct. 10, 2024 / Joshua Benton

With Hurricane Milton looming, NPR stations got a lower-bandwidth way to reach residents — If a webpage ever seems slow, there’s one thing that’s unlikely to be the culprit: its text. Unlike images, videos, or interactive elements, words get encoded into tiny, hyper-efficient packages. War and Peac...

Oct. 10, 2024 / Jon Grinspan

How a 19th-century news revolution sparked activists, influencers, disinformation, and the Civil War — There’s one question I get every time I give a talk. I’m a curator of political history at the Smithsonian Institution, and when I discuss the deep history of political division in our country, someone in the...

Oct. 9, 2024 / Sarah Scire

The typical American TikTok user doesn’t follow a single journalist or traditional media outlet — Pop culture, viral dances, and comedy are big on TikTok. News and politics? Not so much. A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans on TikTok follow very few politicians, journalists, or traditional m...

Oct. 9, 2024 / Zhen Yang

How The New York Times incorporates editorial judgment in algorithms to curate its home page — Whether on the web or the app, the home page of The New York Times is a crucial gateway, setting the stage for readers’ experiences and guiding them to the most important news of the day. The Times publishes over 250 s...

Oct. 8, 2024 / Andrew Deck

Want to change money in Cuba? It’ll probably involve an exiled news outlet — and AI — In Havana, a phrase is widely printed on restaurant menus and displayed by shop owners: “exchange rate of the day.” This daily rate is used to calculate prices for U.S. dollars or euros, which are frequently used ins...

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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