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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

Nov. 29, 2023 / Sarah Scire

A picture is worth a thousand words? Meet the nonprofit newsrooms hiring editorial cartoonists — The San Diego-based nonprofit newsroom inewsource has published in-depth accountability reporting since 2009. The vision? “Betrayals of the public trust are revealed and rectified, wrongdoing is deterred, and inequ...

Nov. 28, 2023 / Patrick Egwu

“African media houses must do more investigative reporting to stay relevant” — Manasseh Azure Awuni is the editor-in-chief of The Fourth Estate, a nonprofit, public-interest, investigative journalism project of the Media Foundation for West Africa. Since its launch in 2021, The Fourth Estate has ...

Nov. 28, 2023 / Colleen Murrell

The Israeli government has Haaretz newspaper in its sights as it tightens the screws on media freedom — The Israeli government is putting pressure on the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz to line up in support of the government in its conduct of the war in Gaza. The communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, has suggested financ...

Nov. 27, 2023 / Joshua Benton

The legal framework for AI is being built in real time, and a ruling in the Sarah Silverman case should give publishers pause — When the comedian Sarah Silverman sued Meta over its AI model LLaMA this summer, it was pretty big news. (And that is, of course, kind of the point. Silverman is actually one of three co-plaintiffs in the case, but not a...

Nov. 22, 2023 / Sophie Culpepper

I’m a media reporter and a diehard Swiftie. I don’t cover Taylor, but here’s how I wish someone would — Last Friday I came home late after a night out with a close friend. I’d worn the friendship bracelet she’d recently given me, talked her ear off about the latest in Taylor Swift’s public romance with America’...

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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