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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

April 15, 2024 / Joshua Benton

PressPad, an attempt to bring some class diversity to posh British journalism, is shutting down — While it’s not true that all good things must come to an end — personally, I’m a fan of gravity — it’s true in digital media more often than you’d like. And it seems to be true with an interes...

April 15, 2024 / Richard Tofel

Is the Texas Tribune an example or an exception? A conversation with Evan Smith about earned income — Evan Smith, founding CEO of the Texas Tribune from 2009 to 2022, is a nonprofit pioneer, a brilliant editor and publisher, and a friend and fellow Yankees fan. These days, he is a senior adviser at Laurene Powell Jobs’...

April 10, 2024 / Jeff Jarvis

The California Journalism Preservation Act would do more harm than good. Here’s how the state might better help news — The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) — like its federal cousin, the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) — is the latest in a century’s attempts by the newspaper industry to diminish ...

April 10, 2024 / Samuel Jens

“Fake news” legislation risks doing more harm than good amid a record number of elections in 2024 — “Fake news” legislation that governments around the world have written in recent years to combat mis- and disinformation does little to protect journalistic freedom. Rather, it can create a greater risk of ha...

April 8, 2024 / Sophie Culpepper

Dateline Totality: How local news outlets in the eclipse’s path are covering the covering — Incarcerated New Yorkers facing a lockdown (and suing successfully against it). Couples from Vermont to Texas tying the knot. Heliophysics research at Southern Illinois University. That’s just a sample of the creative,...

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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