Until now, Circa has been available only on the iPhone — with short shareable clips also available on the website — and it has focused mostly on creating packages of news related to major stories. So for example, Circa editors pull together comprehensive reports on events such as the shutdown of the federal government or the unrest in Syria, which are written based on existing news stories from other outlets (which Circa lists underneath each story). Readers are alerted through the app when there are new updates added.

Real-time breaking news updates to follow

Now, Circa will be pushing real-time breaking news alerts to readers who sign up for the new feature, even though in some cases there might be only a headline or a sentence available, and then users who follow the story will get further alerts as more news is added. Galligan said in an interview the service is going to be very judicious about when it sends out alerts, because he doesn’t want to overload attention-challenged users with notifications for every little blip:

“I’ve personally been pretty insulted when I get a breaking news alert for something trivial, so we’re going to be very careful about how many we send. And time will factor into it as well — it may be a borderline important event, but we know that it’s dinner time on the East Coast, so is that the best time to send it? These kinds of updates are currency — you’re always one step away from people turning them off.”

There are other services that also offer mobile-focused breaking news: a service called Breaking News, for example — which started as a Twitter account and was then acquired by NBC — also offers news alerts both on Twitter and the web, as well as through its mobile apps.

Circa’s “follow” function, however, is somewhat unique. And Galligan says the ability to know when someone has seen updates to a story provides the service with valuable information when it comes to customizing what it shows users. For example, he says, Circa knows when someone has seen a specific update, so if that update needs to be corrected then the app could theoretically push out a correction to only those readers who saw the original mistake.

Users could sign up for unconfirmed reports

This would solve the problem that many journalists have with Twitter as a news source — or the “citizen journalism” that comes from sites like Reddit — which is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that people who saw or re-shared a false report also see and share the correction.

The potential of that kind of customization goes even further, Galligan says: what if users could indicate to Circa that they were willing to see more unconfirmed or speculative news as part of the content within the app? Then the service could send out unverified reports only to those readers who had specifically requested to be added to those lists — and if corrections or updates needed to be sent, then they would only have to go out to a small subset of the userbase.

“Because we have this closed loop, what if we could push out unconfirmed news on an opt-in basis? So as a user, I could say I would like to be more bleeding edge and get more unconfirmed reports — it would be easy enough once it is confirmed to remove the label, or if it turns out not to be true, we can just push out the correction to those people who signed up for it.”

In addition to that kind of customization, Galligan said that an increasing use of Twitter and user-generated content is a likely route for Circa to take as it broadens the sources of news it uses for reporting, and also that the service is looking seriously at how it could integrate its journalism with wearables such as Google Glass. “We’re giving strong consideration to wearables, let’s put it that way,” he said. “After all, our news is already designed to fit those devices.”

Ad Age magazine recently asked Huh how Circa planned to make money. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m sure [co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan] and his team will go figure that out at some point.” Could customization of the kind that Galligan describes be part of the answer? More than likely, I think. Circa has raised $2.4 million in seed funding from a group of investors including Quotidian Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Dave Morin, Matt Mullenweg and Gary Vaynerchuk.

Neither newspaper is doing particularly well, in the larger scheme of things: the Globe was just sold to a local hedge-fund billionaire for $70 million — which means it has lost a staggering 90 percent of its former value in the last two decades. The Washington Post, meanwhile, was just acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, after the paper’s former owners admitted that they couldn’t see a future in which they didn’t have to cut more staff and continue to lose money. Not a great environment for innovation, you might think — but you’d be wrong.

A Twitter-based local news aggregator

As Justin Ellis at the Nieman Journalism Lab notes in a recent post, the Boston Globe‘s in-house research lab has built what amounts to a Twitter-powered news aggregator called 61Fresh — a tool that pulls in tweets based on a number of factors, but most importantly whether the content comes from a number of sites and services of interest to Boston residents. The algorithm-driven experiment is designed to produce a kind of Techmeme-style news aggregator, but one based on geographic parameters rather than topic-specific ones.

Every 10 minutes, the algorithm goes searching for the most viral news items. And because it uses Twitter as its source material, it isn’t just a soul-less feed of the latest headlines, but a snapshot of what people in the community (or at least connected to that community, since some may be ex-residents) see as interesting content worth sharing — whether it’s about Tom Brady or a local fire.

Is this going to somehow save the Globe by generating millions of dollars in revenue? Of course not. But it might help the company figure out how content works now, and how social sharing helps drive engagement, and that certainly couldn’t hurt as it tries to carve out a new path — not to mention that those working on it could develop new skills that might come in handy.

A visual interface for mobile news

Along the same lines, the Washington Post is experimenting with a visually-driven news interface called Topicly, which it launched this week: in a nutshell, it takes the top stories from the newspaper and sorts them based on the number of updates — and then displays them as a series of images tiled across a page, so that when readers click on a topic like “Chemical Weapons,” they get all of the stories the newspaper has written that related to that topic.

Cory Haik, senior director of digital news for the paper, told Ad Week she thought of the interface as a good way to present news for mobile users who don’t want to scroll through a lot of headlines, since it’s easy to see what the top stories are and what they are about (Circa, the San Francisco-based news startup, is also trying to rethink news for mobile). The new Post feature also has its own advertising format, which should make it easy to insert native ads into the stream as well.

Again, this probably isn’t going to make the difference between profitability and unprofitability for the Post, but it is a welcome sign of experimentation and a desire to learn how to present content differently for a mobile, digital audience. And to be fair to the Post, the paper has a long history of that sort of thing — from a Facebook news reader (which didn’t wind up working out) to its algorithmic news-recommendation app Trove and a socially-driven advertising unit.

Since no one really knows what the future of digital media looks like, it’s worth experimenting with as many new things as possible — in part because the next new thing always starts out looking like a toy. So kudos to the Post and the Globe for doing so, despite the gloom all around them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

Circa founding editor Dave Cohn talked about the company’s approach in a recent interview with Fast Company Labs, which has been running a series on technology and the news industry. He described it as “object-oriented journalism,” a term used by journalism professor and media theorist Jeff Jarvis in discussions about how the traditional story format needs to be re-engineered (and an idea that actually dates back to at least 1997, as Cohn noted on Twitter).

This was written in 1997. Start at graph 7 "In Object Oriented Journalism"
bit.ly/1crxJpw cc' @circa Mind…blown.—
David Cohn (@Digidave) June 27, 2013

That analogy in turn comes from the “object-oriented software” movement, which got its start in the 1970s and 80s, and was designed to make programming easier and more efficient by using the concept of data objects — which could then be assembled based on certain rules into higher-level software packages.

This is about as unsexy a metaphor as you could possibly come up with, but it fits the Circa model. The service breaks stories down into their component parts — it sees individual facts themselves as the atomic unit of the news, or the objects that need to be manipulated in order to convey information as efficiently as possible. That allows Circa to dispense with the traditional media habit of recapitulating all of the old details about a story in every version, which is massively inefficient. As Cohn puts it:

“I call it news amnesia. If you do articles, you have to do this since you need something new today. I think it’s as frustrating for journalists as it is for the readers. What we do is say ‘Here’s the latest fact and the story it belongs in.’ Maybe it belongs in two stories. We will then point these stories to each other.”

A related innovation at Circa — which recently hired former Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa to be its editor-in-chief — is the idea of “following” a story, which allows the service to notify users when there is a new fact or update to a developing news event. This is not only more efficient for Circa itself, Cohn suggests, but also more efficient for readers as well.

The idea of “object-oriented journalism” isn’t the only connection between Circa and the world of programming: Cohn notes that the co-founders of Circa wanted to take what Github has done for programming and code — that is, created an open repository where developers can “fork” software projects to create their own, or add their own suggestions to an existing project — and apply the same principles to news.

So could Circa’s database of fact objects eventually be extended in the same way, allowing readers or even other news outlets to “fork” a story or recombine those elements in a different way? That remains to be seen, but Cohn said the service is already thinking about incorporating other atomic units of news, such as tweets, and De Rosa suggested that Circa may even start doing its own original reporting on the news stories it picks up and atomizes.

Embedded below is a video clip from our paidContent conference in April of Circa co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan talking about what the company does:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / violetkaipa

According to the company, fastFT will provide “context and opinion… when 140 characters doesn’t cut it” for breaking news stories, and will include a dash of FT-style personality. The dispatches, which are between 100 and 250 words, will appear on the right side of the FT homepage and on a separate fastFT website. On the iPad, it looks like this:

The outfit will be staffed by eight journalists, who are based in New York, London and Hong Kong and tasked with cranking out up to three items per hour. I spoke with chief correspondent, Megan Murphy, who said fastFT is meant to create more portals and routes for readers to consume the publication’s content.

“Nothing drives me more crazy than when I hear FT readers have gone elsewhere for breaking financial news,” she said, explaining that the dispatches will go up more quickly than a typical news story but provide more context than Twitter. She added that fastFT is aimed not at traders, but as a companion mobile news source for financial professionals.

The launch comes at a time when the market for business news, which is the FT’s bread and butter, is becoming evermore crowded. In addition to long-time rival, the Wall Street Journal, the site must also compete with host of newcomers like the Atlantic’s Quartz and even BuzzFeed. Meanwhile, start-ups like Circa and Summly (recently bought by Yahoo) are tinkering with ways to deliver short summaries of news stories to mobile devices.

As with other FT fare, the bite-sized stories are included for subscribers; for visitors, opening the fastFT page will count against the monthly article cap though opening individual stories will not.

De Rosa also said in a separate interview that he will be adding some new elements to Circa’s news repertoire — including a possible move into more traditional reporting. Galligan said that De Rosa was the company’s only choice for the editor-in-chief position, given what he has accomplished since he became the social-media editor at Thomson Reuters, and his status as a leading source of breaking news during events like the Boston bombings:

“I spoke with Anthony little over a year ago when we were getting Circa started, and gave him some ideas of where we were going, what our thoughts were about where we were going to take news. He was recommended to me by a bunch of people, because he’s always been on the forefront of thinking about this stuff and where news should move… we wanted somebody who could add editorial leadership but also push us forward.”

Reinventing the idea of a news story

As we described in a post last fall, Circa was founded by Galligan and Huh as an attempt to reinvent the news-consumption experience for a mobile device: it provides a summary of the top news stories in a number of categories — but unlike Summly, the news-summarizing app that was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year for an estimated $30 million, Circa’s story summaries are created from third-party news reports by an editorial team of human beings rather than by algorithms.

One of Circa’s unique features is that readers can “follow” or subscribe to a specific story and then get regular updates when there is a new development: instead of having to rewrite the entire story, the way many traditional news outlets do, Circa simply updates the existing entry and alerts users, who can then go directly to the new information. The feature is proving to be popular, Galligan said: during the Boston bombings, close to 30 percent of users subscribed to updates.

De Rosa, who has been social-media editor at Thomson Reuters since July 2011, said he was intrigued by Circa’s “follow” model, and also by other aspects of the service — in part because of a conversation he had with Huh at a media-industry event called NewsFoo before the company was even created. De Rosa said that he and the Cheezburger CEO (who was originally trained as a journalist) shared many of the same thoughts about the future of news.

“I was really interested in a lot of the principles behind it, and I think both of us share the ideals behind what Ben was trying to do — the concept of trying to transform the traditional article format, making articles more useful, thinking about presentation and timeliness, that was distilled into Circa shortly after that.”

Circa may move into traditional reporting

Circa came out of a broader news-reinvention project that Huh started called Moby Dick, which brought together a number of ideas about how news has to change for a digital and mobile age — including theories about how the traditional article format is no longer as useful a way of distributing information to news consumers, something journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and others have also written about (including Dave Cohn, the former Spot.us founder who was the founding editor at Circa and will now be De Rosa’s boss).

De Rosa said that in addition to helping build the editorial team — which currently stands at 11, some of whom are located in foreign countries so that Circa can have a 24-hour news flow — he wants to explore the idea of having Circa staffers do more of their own reporting, rather than just assembling stories based on reports from other news outlets. That extra reporting would likely involve calling primary sources to confirm information, he said.

“There’s no immediate desire to do original reporting, but that might be something I will push for — it doesn’t necessarily mean boots on the ground, but I definitely want to see the newsroom verifying information for themselves, so if we can contact primary sources and make sure that we feel comfortable about the information we’re putting out, I definitely want to ensure that our newsroom’s doing that.”

Both on Twitter and in comments to The Atlantic Wire, former Reuters.com editor Kenneth Li — who hired De Rosa — said that his departure was “heartbreaking” for the wire service. Former Thomson Reuters technology editor Peter Lauria (now at BuzzFeed) said something similar.

Heartbreaking. big loss for us. Big get for @circa RT @Circa: Introducing our new Editor-in-chief: @antderosa. blog.cir.ca/2013/05/28/cir…—
Kenneth Li (@kenli729) May 28, 2013

Big get 4 Circa..big loss 4 Reuters..big congrats 2 AnthonyRT @Circa: Introducing our new Editor-in-chief: @antderosa blog.cir.ca/2013/05/28/cir…—
Peter Lauria (@peterlauria3) May 28, 2013

And De Rosa’s ultimate boss, Circa co-founder and financial backer Ben Huh, also welcomed his newest employee on Twitter:

Welcome to the new world, where managing tweets can lead to the Editor-in-Chief job. Excited to have @AntDeRosa onboard @Circa (cc: @mg)—
  (@benhuh) May 28, 2013

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flick user Jan-Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / wellphoto

However, a few themes came out of our presentations from Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, Jeff Fluhr, co-founder and CEO of Spreecast, Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa, Aria Haghighi, co-Founder and CTO of Prismatic, and Josh Miller, co-founder of Branch. Here were the ones we found most compelling:

• The future of news will come from other people. This isn’t to say that the majority of the world will eventually get all of their news from Twitter and Facebook, but it is fair to say that we’ll increasingly rely on recommendations and smarter social cues from friends and respected strangers as we sort through the vast amount of information available online. This could mean something like Prismatic, which as my colleague Mathew Ingram has written, is working to combine data from social media with individual interests to create a smarter social reader for news.
• We’ll be reading all the news that fits — on mobile. For traditional sites, having a strategy that works for mobile is not longer an option, but we’ll increasingly see mobile-specific approaches from startups like Instagram, which was able to scale successfully by creating a simple, fast photo experience for mobile users in a hurry, or Circa, the startup that’s re-thinking how to structure news stories based on the attention spans and needs of mobile readers.  ”We distill these important details into specific pages,” Galligan said. “You hop through and jump from point to point.”
• It’s all about the individual person and the brand they build. Obviously individuals have always had a hand in shaping the news since the days of newspaper editors picking the stories that end up on the front page. But since the early days of blogging we’ve seen the rise of the personal brand grow in importance, and our panel earlier on Wednesday with some of the pre-eminent bloggers like Maria Popova and Andrew Sullivan only solidified the idea that smart, passionate writers can build their own readership online. Berry talked about how RebelMouse is allowing any individual, whether a famous blogger or not, to highlight personal achievements and content in one place, and with the rise of Twitter we’ll likely see this continue. “RebelMouse allows you in a very efficient way to say, let’s make this my splash,” he said.
• People want to talk about the news but they’re looking for smart conversations. We’re moving on from the days of television round-tables and flame wars in comment threads — or at least many people are looking to move on. Several interesting tools have launched recently that allow for more dynamic conversations online about the news, and we’re seeing those conversations happen both in text and multimedia. Spreecast joins the likes of Google+ Hangouts in lettings users host video discussions with additional social components, and Branch is looking to re-invent online discussions by making them invite-only and embeddable across the web.
• Traditional advertising can’t support the future, but no one’s clear what the alternative looks like. Some of our most heated discussions all day came from the discussion over how to make money from content in a way that allows writers and artists to benefit, consumers to enjoy reasonable prices, and businesses to stay afloat. From Popova discussing affiliate links to Buzzfeed discussing sponsored content, it’s clear we’re far from reaching a consensus. But from Prismatic’s efforts to work with brands to make money off their content on the service to Spreecast’s premium services, it’s clear that startups are at least considering smarter ways to approach the problem than traditional banner ads.

Check out the rest of our PaidContent Live 2013 coverage here.

One approach that has gotten a lot of attention, in part because it comes from former Tumblr designer and Instapaper founder Marco Arment, is an online and mobile magazine called simply The Magazine, which launched earlier this month. The simplicity of the name is reflected in the platform itself: Arment’s digital magazine, which is focused on long-form essays about technology and culture, has virtually none of the elements that we’ve come to associate with online or virtual magazines — it has no masthead or sidebars or boxes with interactive ads, no table of contents or sharing buttons or drop-down menus. In fact, it has virtually nothing but words and links (and some cool hyperlinked footnotes).

One of the reasons why The Magazine is able to strip down its reading experience so much is that it has no advertising of any kind: the content is subsidized solely by subscriptions, and Arment said recently that it is already financially sustainable — since it is being produced almost single-handedly, and therefore has an extremely low cost structure compared to traditional publishing. In that sense, it approaches what some have called “artisanal” publishing, and there is some good discussion of the pros and cons of that model in a Branch discussion that includes designer Jon Lax and NYT staffer Jeremy Zilar.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

From a design perspective, however, the simplicity of the app is its most interesting feature, in part because Arment seems to have approached it in a way that is the complete antithesis of traditional publishers: as he has described in his posts about the genesis of the project, he started it by thinking about what elements he really needed, and left everything else out. By contrast, most magazines and newspapers seem to ask themselves “How can we take all the stuff we already have and the things we already do, and squeeze them into this new container?” This process is fundamentally broken.

Designer Craig Mod looked at The Magazine and its design philosophy in a perceptive essay entitled “Subcompact publishing,” in which he compares what Arment did to the way that Honda disrupted the automotive business in North America, by providing something that fit the minimum needs of a large group of consumers. In a similar way, Mod argues, publishers need to stop thinking about all the things they can cram into a design on the web or a mobile device and start thinking about what developers and entrepreneurs call a “minimum viable product.”

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

There are already some great examples of content experiences that are trying for a “minimum viable product.” The Magazine is one, but so are lesser-known or more experimental features such as Evening Edition, which was created by designer Mike Monteiro and provides a heavily-curated selection of news and features designed to give readers an overview of the world in the same way a newspaper front page does (or used to). Another more recent entrant is a news site called TL;DR — internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” — which summarizes top stories in a more approachable way than traditional portals.

Let the content fit the experience, not the other way around

Other similar experiments include Summ.ly, a startup launched by a 16-year-old entrepreneur, which Om wrote about recently. It is also designed in as simple a way as possible, to take advantage of the limited time and screen real estate that mobile users often have when it comes to content consumption — something that is also a driving force behind Circa, the mobile news-aggregation app launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Matt Galligan and funded by Cheezburger empire CEO Ben Huh. And then there is the short-form, mobile reading experience offered by Tapestry, which was recently launched by New York-based incubator Betaworks based on a model pioneered by author Robin Sloan.

It’s worth noting that Twitter is a great example of the “minimum viable product” approach, both as a company and as a way of publishing content: not only is the restriction to 140 characters something that keeps Twitter from becoming cluttered with too much verbiage — the way other formats such as blogs can be — but the whole nature of the service itself was so simplified that in the beginning it wasn’t even clear to many people what it should be used for. That didn’t start to become obvious (even to the company’s founders, I would argue) until millions of people were using it, and even then many of the uses that the tool was put to came as a surprise.

This is part of the reason why some Twitter users are so concerned about the future of the platform, as it adds more content through features like its expandable “Cards” and seems determined to layer more and more functionality on top of the service. With any kind of publishing, there seems to be an almost irresistable temptation to continue adding more features and content and doo-dads until the original simplicity of the experience is lost, or at least significantly diluted.

Why aren’t more traditional publishers experimenting with features or services that are similar to Arment’s magazine, or Tapestry’s mobile approach, or a stripped-down experience like that offered by TL;DR or Circa? It’s not because they can’t — obviously they could if they wanted to. But as Craig Mod suggests in his essay, with reference to disruptive economics guru Clay Christensen, they don’t do this for the same reason North American auto-makers didn’t compete with Honda: they simply didn’t see it as a competitor until it was almost too late, because they had defined their business in the wrong way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

The app is more than just an attempt to rethink the way that traditional news is delivered or consumed: Huh and Galligan want to rethink how it is constructed, on an almost molecular level, and adapt that for an age that is becoming increasingly mobile and time-constrained.

Part of the thinking behind Circa comes from ideas that have been described by author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, as well as media-startup veteran David Cohn, who is also a founding partner of Circa and acts as its editor-in-chief. The main idea is that the traditional article or story format that newspapers and other news outlets have produced for so many years no longer fits with the way we produce or consume information now. The standard “inverted pyramid”-style article was designed for the days when people might only see one report about a news event, printed on dead trees and without links, so it had to include virtually everything.

Now, however, the news has become more of a process than an artifact, with multiple reports from different sources, updates, social links and other elements added over time. But news-reading formats remain more or less the same as they have always been.

News needs to adapt for mobile consumption

As Circa CEO Galligan also points out, more and more people are consuming the news on their phones and other mobile devices, as recent surveys from research agencies like the Pew Center For People and the Press confirm. If the long and often overly-complicated news article doesn’t jibe with the way we consume information in a digital age, it is even more out of step with the way we consume news on a mobile phone. As Galligan put it in an interview before Circa’s launch:

“With tablets you can kind of lean back and read longer articles, but the phone is dramatically different — you’re in line waiting for the subway or you’re in line for coffee and it’s kind of ‘gap time.’ Lengthy articles are very time intensive and attention intensive, and they are tough to consume on the phone.”

So part of Circa’s mission, Galligan says, was to rethink not just the way that traditional news is delivered for mobile or digital audiences, but to rethink the way that news is produced as well — and that meant trying to boil down the idea of a news story into its component pieces. So Circa doesn’t show you an entire news article, the way a mobile news app from the New York Times or some other traditional outlet would: instead, it breaks the news down into its “atomic units,” which consist of a series of news facts, background information and other elements (photos, quotes, etc.) A user can then choose how many of those atomic units to read at a given time.

So in looking at a news event like the vice-presidential debate, for example, Circa began with a short paragraph about the stakes for the respective candidates, with much of the emphasis on the Obama campaign to make up for the allegedly lacklustre performance of the president in the previous presidential debate. If that’s all you wanted to know, the brief would be enough — but scrolling down in the app produces other points, each of which is a short paragraph or two that adds more in the way of background to the story, a quote to highlight the issues, and so on. The points are written by Circa’s editors, and the sources for each are included at the end of each item.

Rethinking not just news consumption, but production

Circa also lets users “follow” a story, which is like a bookmark — so as new information or updates are added to developing stories, a reader is alerted to that when they open the app and can easily see what new developments there have been in the news events they are interested in. Breaking up the traditional story structure in this way allows Circa to come at the news from a different perspective, Cohn said in an email interview:

“Once you start to think of news as happening in these ‘atomic units,’ rather than as things that need to be wrapped up and shipped in an article, you can start to do different and unique things such as let people “follow” a story, provide different context based on what a reader has consumed before, bridge from one point to a story that provides background, and so on.”

I have only just started playing with Circa, so it’s hard to say whether this kind of atomic-level news consumption will become mainstream, or whether most people are happy enough consuming traditional news articles through mobile platforms like Flipboard or through newer aggregators like Prismatic (which Galligan says he is a big fan and user of). And if the idea of Circa is to allow people to quickly scan short news briefs, what is the business model? On that topic, Galligan says the company is thinking about advertising, but also about the back-end production platform that Circa has built, which other news entities or content producers might be interested in.

There’s one thing to be said for Circa, however: unlike most of the existing news-reading apps from both traditional media players and newer entities like Flipboard or Zite, it shows some of the most advanced thinking about not just the delivery of news but the way news stories are constructed, and that is refreshing. It’s ironic — and somewhat fitting — that it comes from a man like Huh, who has been regularly scoffed at for his theories about journalism.