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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate.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

May 25, 2023 / Sophie Culpepper

Last Night at School Committee distills hours-long public meetings into half-hour podcast episodes — Jill Shah has attended a lot of Boston School Committee meetings. As president of the Shah Family Foundation — a Boston-based nonprofit focused on food access, health and wellness, and education — she has collaborate...

May 24, 2023 / Sarah Scire

The number of nonprofit digital newsrooms grew again in 2022 — The Institute for Nonprofit News reported a 17% growth in the number of new nonprofit newsrooms in 2022, in an annual report released this week. INN’s Index Report Snapshot is based on self-reported data from 315 n...

May 24, 2023 / Francesco Zaffarano

How Seen’s mobile journalism reaches 7 million people across platforms — For this issue, I spoke with Seen‘s co-founder, Yusuf Omar. He was previously a CNN senior social media reporter on Snapchat and mobile editor at the Hindustan Times in India. [Ed. note: You can also watch OmarR...

May 23, 2023 / Kathryn Buchanan

Seeing stories of kindness may counteract the negative effects of consuming bad news — “If it bleeds, it leads” has long been a saying used in the media to describe how news stories featuring violence, death and destruction grab readers’ attention — and so dominate the news agenda. And,...

May 22, 2023 / Sophie Culpepper

How one journalist uses Instagram to pull back the curtain on her reporting process — As a D.C. crime and criminal justice beat reporter for The Washington Post, Emily Davies has a few strategies for understanding how her sources see the world. Following people she covers on social media — including som...

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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