Ken Doctor writes for the Nieman Journalism Lab about the upcoming business news site Quartz, launching later this month from The Atlantic.

Doctor writes, “Aimed at the ‘global business elite,’ it begins with a staff of 25, about 20 of them journalists. But those two dozen staffers, largely based in New York, have a significant Atlantic Media bench to call on. The leadership team that revived the moribund Atlantic Monthly, rethought National Journal, and launched government tech site NextGov has been spending a fair amount of time on its new baby. Beyond startup, Quartz has audience, analytics, advertising, finance, and other Atlantic Media assets to call on, and that makes it bigger than it may first seem.

“But it’s still a couple dozen insurgent journalists facing the behemoths of the business news business. Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal buy journalists by the thousands, and the Financial Times is truly a powerhouse global player. So editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, late of the Journal, must think niche. Ah, but what niche? And how will he make it intriguing enough for that ‘elite’ that already feels glutted by their overflowing daily news diets? Delaney has hired an impressive staff, including The Economist’s Gideon Lichfield, former Nieman Lab staffer Zach Seward, and Foreign Policy’s Steve LeVine.

“You can’t pick a better category of news than business for advertising revenue. It, along with tech, still fetches the highest rates for publishers, with $40-100 CPMs (cost-per-thousand rates). That’s why Rupert Murdoch is making The Wall Street Journal the center (‘The newsonomics of the News Corp split’) of his news company spinoff and buying additional business news assets in Australia. That’s why The New York Times has pushed its business envelope, even as it has trimmed coverage in other areas.”

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Marie Griffin of BtoB Magazine writes about Quartz, the new business news site coming soon from The Atlantic that hopes to present business news and information in a different way.

Griffin writes, “While the Quartz user interface is under wraps until its debut, Smith said it has been built in HTML5, making it browser-based and viewable on any mobile device. Users will be able to bookmark the app to their mobile screens for an experience similar to apps designed exclusively for operating systems from Apple (iOS), Google (Android) and others. Quartz will also employ responsive design so that the format will adapt automatically to the size of the viewer’s screen.

“With an advertising-supported business model, Quartz will not put what Smith calls ‘the friction of a paywall’ between its content and the audience. That differentiates Quartz from the Financial Times and The Economist, which have digital subscription models and serve the audience of C-suite and senior-level global business professionals that Quartz is also targeting. Smith estimated Quartz could ultimately reach an audience of 10 million to 15 million.

“Meanwhile, the journalistic quality of Quartz is expected to be on par with other top business sites. Smith brought in Kevin Delaney, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Online, as editor in chief.

“‘The core and majority of our content will be original, but we are very interested in the open Web and aggregation,’ Smith said. ‘We are also building a large body of commentary.’

“Social networks will play a key role, too. ‘Social distribution has been at the center of the traffic growth strategy of TheAtlantic.com and represents a similar opportunity for Quartz,’ he added.”

Read more here.