Circa News 1.0 launched nearly 18 months ago in October 2012, and since then we’ve learned more than we could have even imagined. But one thing that we’ve stayed true to is the idea that at Circa we don’t do summaries, we tell stories. We thought this would be a great time to revisit that concept.
Recently, the mobile news space has seen a lot of new activity. But unlike Circa, many of these new apps have placed their focus on summaries. Following our mission to inform, we think summaries provide “just enough” for a mobile news product, but they don’t necessarily go all the way. They may look the part and talk the talk, but that’s not where we believe things should end. News summaries tend to provide little context about a story, and this may be further underscored as many news stories will evolve over time.
A cynical view of some news apps is that their summaries are a brochure to sell their longer form content. Others may use summaries to link to an external publisher’s longer form content. In the end, the core functionality is all about browsing. They may provide an illusion of informing the reader, while actually functioning as an aggregator. Now we’re not here to vilify aggregators as we think some can be truly great (who doesn’t love Techmeme!) but they are not final destinations. By nature, they don’t provide a full news experience.
A more generous view of summary apps is that their goal is to provide a full experience (not send you elsewhere), and the final product to accomplish this is a summary. With that in mind, we’d like to revisit some of the key points from the last time we posted on summaries vs. Circa’s living stories nearly two years ago.
It’s true, our content is concise, to the point and we provide links back to our sources. But Circa stories aren’t summaries. Indeed, stories can never be summaries – and we believe in stories.
Why stories at all? Why not just write a summary of each news article? We feel it would be deficient. And we use that word carefully. It’s not that summaries would be bad – but “deficient” (“lacking in some necessary quality or element.”)
Summaries aren’t alive. They are more or less static and reflective only of the article they are summarizing. If you read two summaries of similar articles you’d still suffer the fate of news amnesia – two good summaries about Hurricane Sandy probably repeat themselves.
More important than the problem of repetition is that of scope. By its very nature a summary is a birds eye view of one article. But often it’s the subtle details in an article or the nuance across several sources that make a story come to life. This is how a reader gets informed. This is how a storyteller creates an experience…. Learning about the world shouldn’t be a chore. It also shouldn’t be mindless. It should be an experience.
Many people look at Circa and think we are providing summaries. Sure, the veneer of our stories may be similar because they are concise but as GigaOm pointed out, Circa stories are actually longform in disguise:
While most of the services mentioned give users brief news items that they can consume quickly while standing in line at the bank or in the back of a cab, Galligan says Circa’s approach differs in one major way: since it allows users to “follow” a specific story, and get updates only about new developments on that story, it essentially is building a long-form news story over time — just in bite-size chunks.
Circa’s news stories are always short in the moment, but that’s only the beginning. We invest our time on singular storylines that evolve and build them up over time, providing continuing context through our “follow” feature. This is possible because of the difference between atomizing stories, instead of summarizing them. Being short is a byproduct of our mission, not the mission itself. Summaries are great – but they can’t let you stay in touch with stories you care about over time. When you create a summary, just like an article, there is potential repetition and no structure to the content. When you atomize content – you add structure to it. That structure allows us to serve readers better throughout the life of a story.
The mobile news space has matured very quickly, even in just the last two years since Circa’s inception. Additionally it’s been very exciting to see many of our original assumptions validated in this time. We truly hope the space as a whole can learn from our experiences in building Circa, and we hope to learn from their existence as well.
