Quartz (publication)

Name

According to its press release, the publication's name "Quartz" was chosen for various reasons related to its branding and the unusual combination of two infrequently used letters, "q" and "z" in the title. The site's URL was created by dropping the other characters, leaving behind qz.com.

Launch

In September 2012, Quartz officially launched its website, qz.com. Rather than a traditional homepage, it was designed as a mobile-first design website. The webpage was designed to deliver contents primarily to users of tablet and mobile first then website later in this order. Its founding team members were from several other news organizations, including Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), The Economist and the New York Times. According to its website, its team has a record of reporting in 115 countries and speaks 19 languages. They are led by Kevin Delaney, a former managing director of WSJ.com, Zach Seward, a former WSJ newspaper's social media editor, and Gideon Lichfield, a global news editor from The Economist, among other editors.

Quartz's main office is located in New York, with correspondents and staff reporters in London, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.

Quartz announced in September 2015 that they attracted a record of 16 million monthly unique visitors. Its year-to-date revenue has risen 80% since (2014) last year.

Quartz India (2014)

Since the launch of Quartz in September 2012, India has consistently been served as a top contributor for Quartz's international traffic. With the growing demand in consuming business news via digital and mobile devices, together with the fact that there aren't many digital publishers available in the region, Quartz decided to launch Quartz India to cover the region. In less than a year of the launch of Quartz India, the number of monthly unique visitors of Quartz India has grown from 200,000 initially to 500,000, representing approximately 5 percent of Quartz's overall traffic.

Quartz Africa (2015)

Quartz decided to launch its second international news site in Africa in June 2015. The launch was similar to the launch in India in 2014 and it also partnered with GE. It views Africa as a potential market due to a high mobile penetration rate and a high rate of innovation in the region.

Quartz Africa focuses on 'Africa Innovators', 'Nigeria Now', and 'China in Africa'. It aims to cover a global view of the continent as well as other international stories that are related to its African audience. Unlike other media sources, Quartz differentiates itself by focusing on technology, business and innovation in the continent, rather than the more crises-driven media outlets reporting elsewhere.

Other significant launches

Quartz launched Atlas in 2015, a home for all of its charts. It can be accessed at atlas.qz.com.

Quartz launched its first podcast in partnership with Marketplace, called Actuality. The podcast focuses on top international news and the conversations journalists might have when discussing how to cover a news story.

Also Quartz launched its first mobile app. It is a semi-interactive app, because of the text-like design.

Audience

Quartz is a free digital news publication with no paywalls or registration. It relies entirely on native advertising and sponsored content to fund its business. This opens access to more readers, but raises questions of objectivity, since the company answers to advertisers rather than subscribers. Quartz is designed to carry two ad formats: The "Engage" format is a large, non-IAB standard banner, while the "Bulletin" is a native and interactive ad format with sponsored content.

Quartz targets high-earning readers who traditionally read other left-leaning publications. 60% of its readers access the site via mobile devices, and 40% of its readers are outside the United States. As of November 2015, there are 180,000 subscribers to the Quartz Daily Brief.

Content

In traditional newspaper "beats", news is divided into sections such as domestic, business and finance, and world economy. However, Quartz is structured around a collection of phenomena or "obsessions". Quartz Global News Editor Gideon Lichfield wrote that instead of using a fixed beats structure, its newsroom is structured around a collection of phenomena or patterns, trends and seismic shifts that shape the world its readers live in. He further explains, "Financial markets" is a beat, but "the financial crisis" is a phenomenon. "The environment" is a beat, but "climate change" is a phenomenon. "Energy" is a beat, but "the global surge of energy abundance" is a phenomenon. That structure, according to Lichfield, allows the organization to follow larger phenomenon and adapt to pattern changes more quickly. Also, Lichfield views news topics as unfixed with overlapping boundaries, which require all-rounder journalists, making necessary specialization in certain topics as with beat reporting, obsolete.

Design

Quartz's website design is user-friendly for tablet and mobile users by allowing customers to scroll down without having to choose or click any links to read its news. Quartz is able to use the same website design for all types of devices, including tablets, mobile phones and laptops. Quartz is hosted on WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting which serves content across all platforms.

Quartz extensively uses charts, created through their tool called "Chart Builder." It helps journalists create their own charts in a short period of time. Quartz is open-sourcing Chart builder and is now used by many media organizations, including NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, CNBC, The Press-Enterprise, New Hampshire Public Radio, NBC News, and FiveThirtyEight. A searchable chart database called "Atlas" allows users to access, download, and embed past charts.