YO. (Photo: TechCrunch )

File this one under 'second acts in American lives': This week, Business Insider honcho Henry Blodget gets the New Yorker treatment (subscription only, you cheap bastards), with a profile by none other than the bold-faced Ken Auletta. Sure, he's still banned for life from the securities business (for now!), but being written up by Mr. Auletta ain't too bad as a life consolation prize.

In Mr. Auletta's estimation, the media mogul comes across like a bit of huckster. Take, for example, his spiritual presence in the newsroom: “When he talks, his arms swing and his voice rises, conveying the enthusiasm of an evangelist." Early employee Peter Kafka came to a similar conclusion:  "He’s an excellent communicator," adding, "He has a great Barnum in him."

Ringmasters may bring the crowds, but you don't want to end up with a briefcase full of snake oil, either:

"A senior Wall Street executive, asked if he trusted Blodget, said, 'Of course not. This doesn't mean he can't have good ideas. But he's a promoter.'"

You don't say!

Mr. Auletta even lends his considerable powers of analysis to explain that absurd "I Rode in a Big Metal Sky Bird!" post:

"The post is consistent with a conscious decision that Blodget says he made at the outset 'to put the fun back in business' by making light of people in the news and of himself. 'If we see something is funny, we don't wait to see if the Pulitzer Committee likes it,' he said. 'We post it.'"

Mr. Auletta boils the company down to its essence: "If Bloomberg and Fleshbot had an illegitimate child, it might look something like Business Insider."

Unfortunately, all that song and dance isn't enough to turn Business Insider into a money-printing enterprise just yet, but you can't have everything. According to the piece, Business Insider lost $3 million in 2012, though Mr. Blodget later added on Twitter that the company turned a small profit in Q1. (He also insisted that $3 million was an "investment," not a loss.)

The company's chairman, the ubiquitous Kevin Ryan, blames the loss on aggressive expansion and says the company will do $11 million this year in revenue this year. Mr. Ryan admitted, though: "That's tiny. Ad rates are low. It's tough to monetize."

Still, we like to imagine William Randolph Hearst looking down with a gleam in his eye and a whisper: "Attaboy."

(Photo: Circa blog)

In recent months, LOLcat emperor and  Bravo TV star Ben Huh has systematically leaked handfuls of details about his news startup, Circa, to the press. Back in April, Circa raised $750,000 from a slew of investors (many of whom were named David). In May, Nieman Lab caught up with Mr. Huh at ROFLCON, where he provided buzzword-laden answers and metaphors involving newspapers and teenagers to their questions about the startup. But today, Mr. Huh's efforts have finally solidified into a cohesive company: Circa is an iPhone app that wants to change the way readers consume news.

Circa isn't just a news aggregator. It employs teams of editors who curate and synthesize news stories into digestible bites, optimized for reading on mobile devices. The point is to write stories that are designed exclusively for mobile, instead of repackaging stories released on other platforms and trying to fit them into a mobile setting.

According to the Circa blog:

Instead of articles, Circa presents news as a collection of details about a story: the facts, stats, quotes, pictures, maps, and more. These are the full stories, not summaries; summaries tend to compress stories and therefore lose details. Instead, each story on Circa has the same details you’d find in traditional articles, but broken down into individual chunks of information that are much easier to consume. It’s the facts, without the fluff.

The details, or points, are presented in an interface that works a little like the flash cards like we used in school to learn and retain new information. Flash cards improve  comprehension, retention, as well as speed of learning. Each point within a Circa story is presented on its own “card,” so it’s easy to swipe through and read a whole story in less than a minute.

Unlike a leisurely tablet reading experience where beautifully templated longform stories are embraced and pored over, reading on a mobile device is all about the quick and dirty. Circa aims to provide those digestible factoids for users to quickly absorb on-the-go. (It kind of reminds us of The Skimm, but not in a newsletter format.) Users can also follow stories and topics, and the Circa app will alert them when there are any updates.

“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," Circa's editor in chief, David Cohn, told GigaOm.

Because the team of journalists tasked with writing the content for Circa is basically synthesizing other publications' reporting into a simple news for dummies flashcard, there's bound to be some grumbling about sourcing. Circa argues that proper sourcing is close to its heart, however. "We know that truth and trust are paramount in news, and that’s why we work hard to provide the source to every single point that we write within a story," reads the blog post.

No word yet on how adorable cat pictures will factor into the Circa newsgathering process.

Aurora Massacre suspect James Holmes on CNN

Shortly after a black-clad psycho opened fire in an Aurora, Colorado midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises on Thursday night, killing at least 12 and injuring 50, Reddit users began racing to compile as much information on the tragedy as possible. In the process, the link aggregation giant became a real-time feed of raw data, much of the information accurate, some of it not, all of it published for a fully-engaged and active audience well in advance of any national news outlet. The Future Journalism Project on Tumblr defined it correctly as crowd-sourcing the reportage and noted some of the most organized efforts by Redditors: sequential, linked threads in the /r/news subreddit:

• Comprehensive timeline: Aurora Massacre
• Comprehensive timeline, part 2: Aurora Massacre
• Comprehensive timeline, part 3: Aurora Massacre

Each post was a crisp feed of new developments almost as they happened, Redditor integ3r frequently editing out bad data and polishing good information as commenters threw everything they could find into the pot regarding first-person accounts of the shooting on Twitter (and elsewhere on Reddit), possible victims and information on the suspected killer, 24-year-old James Holmes.

In spite of integ3r's best efforts, there were information misfires (and the usual trolling) in comments, making sourcing the Reddit threads a risky proposition for members of the mainstream media following along. We don't know (for example) if ABC's Brian Ross used Reddit as his source for a spurious and widely-ridiculed conflating of Mr. Holmes with a Jim Holmes whose membership status in the Denver Tea party was once posted online, but a link speculating about the connection was posted--and debunked--in one of the Reddit timelines well in advance of Mr. Ross's statement.

A frequent version of this question has popped up in various Reddit threads about various nuggets of information regarding the Aurora Massacre: why isn't this on the national news? The answer is that networks are attempting from the first report to build a narrative, make a story. Reddit is simply after pure, virtually unfiltered information and Redditors more than willing to sort it all out for themselves as they go along.

Reddit's unfiltered onslaught of good and bad data when covering rapidly breaking stories like this mass shooting isn't superior to layers of vetting by editors and producers slaving away in editing bays in newsrooms across America--but it is likely becoming a hidden, key ingredient whenever Big News blood sausage gets made.