Matt Galligan is co-founder and CEO of Circa. You can follow him on Twitter at @mg.
On this week’s Thunderdome Live, we’ll be joined by Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa.
A “mobile first” start-up, Circa markets its app as the best way to read news on your phone. For a closer look at how the app works and feels, check out the video demo at the bottom of this post.
For a different take, though, here’s our list of the top five ways in which Circa represents the future of journalism.
Come back Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. EST for the live chat with Matt.
Quality matters.
Not only is the build quality of Circa’s app pretty incredible (with frequent updates), but the content is also sharp — stories are reduced and arranged in a very easy-to-read (dare I say, beautiful) format that makes news consumption a pleasure. And the journalism underlying the whole thing, well, that’s sound too: Serving as the organization’s editor-in-chief is David Cohn, who had previously founded the journalism startup Spot.us (now owned by APM) and also carries a degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Do what you do best and link to the rest.
The mantra of Jeff Jarvis, Circa seems to have absorbed this lesson at a fundamental level — there’s virtually no original reporting in Circa’s content! But that’s intentional. Circa sees journalistic value in taking “facts” from other reportage and assembling them into a story format engineered for mobile readership. If you’re interested in this topic, Circa has a blog post explaining the difference between ‘information’ and ‘content’. (And for even more, check out Jarvis.)
The entrepreneurial journalist cometh.
Entrepreneurial journalism is a frequent topic on the future of journalism news, but far less common is finding someone who actually embodies the concept. The team at Circa definitely qualifies, though, as both individuals and an organization. Matt is no stranger to the start-up world, having previously co-founded Socialthing and SimpleGeo, co-founder Ben Huh brought the world Cheezburger Network, and we’ve already discussed the work David did with Spot.Us. Circa represents the truth that the future is here, just unevenly distributed — Matt, David, and Ben had a vision for how news looks when done “mobile first” and they made it their business to actualize that.
Atomic units of news are real.
In Circa’s world, they’re called “points” and they constitute the basest division of news into its component parts. It might be a quote or a fact or an image, but by identifying these pieces and storing them in a bespoke database, newsroom developers open themselves up to remixing these pieces into future content. Breaking news into its discrete parts also makes possible the act of “following” a story — instead of writing a full-length article every time news breaks, a Circa reporter can post an updated ‘point’ to an existing item, thereby also notifying any readers who had subscribed that there’s an update to the story.
The arc of computing is long, but it bends towards mobile.
We’ve already seen it in certain markets — the inflection at which mobile web traffic overtakes desktop traffic. Circa, as a company, has staked its entire claim on this trend (with the small qualification that stories are web-accessible for visitors from social). How soon until mobile is the norm? The Economist thinks we’ll be there by the end of the year.