Circa news app – image from TechCrunch

Just how dominant can the liveblog format become? In Model for the 21st Century Newsroom Redux I noted how quickly the format has been adopted as a default mode of reporting (for example, how widely the format was being used to report on public sector strikes).

In March 2012 the relaunch of the ITV News website saw the format adopted as the default mode of presentation.

In August The Guardian’s horizontally-navigated Olympics liveblog caught my eye.

Now news app Circa is taking the concept back onto mobile (where most liveblogging starts), and adding a few twists, including push updates.

It’s a simple idea: look at the latest news, pick stories you want to follow, and get a notification when something new happens on that story.

The key difference is that updates are not delivered as traditional articles, but as bitesize updates. In other words, as a liveblog would.

In fact, the app imposes a liveblog-like structure on all of its reporting, with stories split into those bitesize chunks from the start, and embedded links pointing elsewhere.

But it’s the mixture of browse-and-push – combining the two consumption patterns of lean-forward and lean-back – that I particularly like.

At the moment the news is very US-dominated and lacks any categories other than the US election (I’m told they’re looking for a UK-based contributing editor). I would expect that to change (awaiting response), while some sort of understanding of your social graph (following/interests) would be an intelligent move too.

In the meantime, though, this is a lovely piece of information design which demonstrates once again why the traditional news article isn’t the only way to tell a story.