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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

March 30, 2023 / Joshua Benton

Buying Grid gives The Messenger a boost in social, not just in staffing its newsroom — The Messenger’s purchase of Grid last week raised some eyebrows, at least in the small community of people who could tell you what both The Messenger and Grid are. (Or, in Grid’s case now, used to be. Its web...

March 30, 2023 / Laura Hazard Owen

Are BuzzFeed’s AI-generated travel articles bad in a scary new way — or a familiar old way? — BuzzFeed said in January that it would start using AI to write quizzes and other content — and now we’re seeing some of what the “other” content might look like. Specifically, it looks a lot like the...

March 29, 2023 / Thomas E. Patterson

Public radio can help solve the local news crisis — if it will expand staff and coverage — Since 2005, more than 2,500 local newspapers, most of them weeklies, have closed, with more closures on the way. Responses to the decline have ranged from luring billionaires to buy local dailies to encouraging digital s...

March 27, 2023 / Joshua Benton

Leaked code, blocked journalists, and billions gone: It’s just another few days in late Twitter — If you read much about politics online, particularly on the left, it’s a phrase you’ve probably seen: late capitalism. Its meaning isn’t always clear — it’s shifted over time — but contemporar...

March 27, 2023 / Dan Gillmor

The corrections dilemma: Admitting your mistakes increases accuracy but reduces audience trust, a new study finds — We have some good news for journalists who want to ensure that the public has the best and most accurate information. Corrections work. When you correct your errors, the people who see the corrections have a more accurat...

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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