I've wanted to comment on Circa since they suspended operation.

1. I think they were on to something. Starting topics, and then adding stories to each topic as the news comes in. A story isn't something that's published once and done, it's more of a process. It isn't just a linear re-shaping of what we did in the print era. Maybe now that they've suspended operations, one of their developers could do a YouTube demo of how the editorial tools worked? I'm sure I would find it interesting.

1. If the editorial tools were good and reasonably easy to use, I wish they would have made them the product, and hired journalists, as needed, to mold an editorial product created by the users of the product. Find the good stuff and surface it. That's how news must scale to meet the Web. 

1. Circa resisted joining the open web. I think that was a fundamental mistake. They needed to find more readers, to do that they had to find the people who distribute links. Linkblogging is a real thing, and there are people who are good at it. But if there's no URL for each story, you can't linkblog it. So they didn't grow fast enough. I think this is almost mathematical. No one, going forward, should try this. Each story must have a way to get to it through a Web address. Even if Facebook et al own the distribution system.