Tag Archives: Quartz
Quartz makes design tweak
by Chris Roush
The Atlantic’s business news site Quartz has made minor changes to its design, reports Peter Kafka of All Things D.
Kafka writes, “The more interesting thing to note about Quartz’s overhaul is that it is one of dozens of changes Atlantic Media’s newest property has made since it launched seven months ago. Quartz editor Kevin Delaney says the site has pushed 73 code chages since Quartz first debuted, most of which have to do with the way the site’s guts function.
“The reason Quartz can do that, Delaney argues, is because of its decision to rely on an HTML5 design which essentially serves up the same page to every reader, no matter which which device they’re using to access the site. If you want to change the way an HTML5 site looks or behaves, you can simply change it — no need to monkey with an app that’s already downloaded to someone’s iPhone or Android.
“That runs counter to a lot of current digital distribution thinking, which holds that every Web distributor — from newspapers to Facebook to Netflix — needs to be thinking app first.
“No need to beat the debate into the ground — it’s really only relevant to a few thousand people, and it can take on a religious overtone — but it is worth noting that it seems to be working for Quartz. Delaney says his site is now attracting two million users a month.”
Read more here.
Quartz names new senior Asia correspondent
by Chris Roush
Kevin Delaney, the editor of the business news site Quartz, sent out the following staff announcement on Thursday morning:
I’m very pleased to welcome Adam Pasick as our new senior Asia correspondent.
Adam has been online managing editor at New York Magazine since 2010, where he’s helped drive the impressive success of nymag.com and its must-read Daily Intel blog.
Adam will move to Bangkok in March, and from there contribute to our coverage of the region and overnight global news. He will be both writing and editing.
In 2010, Adam worked at Atlantic Media in DC on the first, unlaunched iteration of the Quartz project headed by Michael Kinsley. As a result, Adam knows deeply Atlantic Media and its thinking about covering global business news.
Prior to that, he had a series of important jobs at Reuters, including as US editor of Reuters.com, where he managed the site’s homepage team and championed multimedia and social media efforts. Adam was Reuters’ Deals editor and launched a successful M&A section on its site, and spent several years in London as Reuters’ UK media correspondent.
Adam also has the curious distinction of being Reuters’ bureau chief for several years in the virtual world Second Life, where his intrepid (and surreal?) journalistic achievements included an interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (For those who missed Second Life, it was a big deal back in the day, trust me.)
At Quartz, we’re looking to Adam to bring the same journalistic creativity and entrepreneurialism to our coverage and to our successful email newsletter offering.
Please join me in welcoming him. Adam will start March 1 and work with us here for a few weeks before moving. He’s @adampasick—please start following him in the meantime.
Quartz hires Gina Chon, former WSJ reporter
by Chris Roush
Quartz editor in chief Kevin Delaney sent out the following staff announcement on Monday morning:
I’m very pleased to welcome Gina Chon as our new corporate reporter.
Gina comes to us following seven years at The Wall Street Journal, where she did a remarkable job in some of the most prominent and challenging reporting posts at the newspaper.
Gina most recently covered mergers and acquisitions, with scoops that included the $30 billion sale of Medco, the $20 billion sale of Genzyme, and American Airlines’ status as a merger target. Among other things, she contributed to a series of scoops on the backstory of the Facebook IPO, and Yahoo’s search for new board members.
From 2007 to 2009, Gina was the Journal’s sole reporter in Iraq, overseeing 10 local Iraqi staff and producing a stream of thoughtful reports for the paper, including her scoop about anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr disarming his militia. On her return from Baghdad, Gina covered the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, working with Zach to chronicle on Facebook and a blog one man’s search for his family that was later published as a page one story.
Gina started with the Journal in 2005 in Detroit, where she would help break the news on Chrysler being sold to Cerberus. Prior to that, she wrote a book about the Khmer Rouge, trained Iraqi journalists, worked for AsiaWeek and Fortune in Seoul, was an editor at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and reported and edited for the Associated Press. Gina speaks Korean, along with some French and Arabic.
At Quartz, Gina will lead our growing coverage of businesses and their leaders. We’re looking to her to spot the most interesting and important corporate stories for our global readership, and apply her world-class reporting skills and expert analysis. We expect Gina will help us build out our Quartz obsessions over time, and also profile and track key people leading or being sidelined by business disruption.
Smart journalism, unique analysis, digital flair and a global worldview are at the core of our efforts to create a new kind of business news outlet. Gina, along with some other new members of the Quartz reporting team that I expect to announce in the coming weeks, will help build on the great, creative work you have all done so far, and the global readership it has attracted beyond our expectations.
Please join me in welcoming Gina. I trust you will find her an exceptional journalist and colleague, and encourage you to work with her closely.
Chon left the Journal last summer after admitting to a violation of the paper’s ethics code.
Quartz hits 1 million visitors in December
by Chris Roush
Joe Pompeo of Capital New York reports Monday that the recently launched business news site Quartz had 1.4 million unique visitors in December.
Pompeo writes, “It’s worth an announcement because December was only the third full month of operation for the site, which debuted Sept. 24 with a focus on reaching readers on mobile platforms like tablets and smartphones. The site clocked 840,343 uniques during the month of October and 858,183 in November, according to Omniture metrics provided by a spokesperson.
“‘We’re really happy with the numbers,’ editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney told Capital in a telephone interview. ‘They prove that you can do smart global business content and have it very quickly find a large readership that’s both international and on mobile and tablet devices. So it only increases our confidence in some of the guiding principals at the launch of Quartz.’
“Atlantic Media is making the Quartz numbers public as the company’s 155-year-old flagship brand, The Atlantic, is celebrating a third year of profitability driven largely by the success of its digital titles, theatlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire and Atlantic Cities. It’s also beginning to experiment with paid digital models for The Atlantic, although it appears Quartz will not be a part of that thrust.
“Asked whether the company was toying with a paid model for Quartz, Delaney said: ‘Not that I’m aware of. Our focus right now is not in that direction.’”
Read more here.
Quartz grows traffic through social media
by Chris Roush
Lauren Indvik of Mashable writes about how two-month-old business news site Quartz is growing its audience.
Indvik writes, “It’s none too surprising, then, that the makeup of Quartz‘s referral traffic is markedly different from the business publications it seeks to compete against: Approximately 40% of traffic comes from social networks, 35% from other websites and 11% from search, Editor in Chief Kevin Delaney tells me. The remaining 14% is attributed to direct traffic and Quartz‘s email newsletter. Its mobile audience is significant: Two in every 10 visitors accesses the site from a smartphone, and one in every 10 arrives via tablet.
“The percentage of social media referrals is particularly high. The Economist, by comparison, owes just 15% of incoming traffic to social media, a spokesperson for the magazine tells me. Within social, Delaney says Twitter is Quartz‘s number one referrer, followed by Digg, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn — an unusual assortment for a business publication.
“Approximately 60% off traffic is domestic. Following the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Australia and Germany rank highest in readership — ‘which is great, because we haven’t done a lot of marketing internationally,’ Delaney observes.”
Read more here.
Quartz traffic exceeds expectations in first month
by Chris Roush
Emma Bazilian of Adweek reports that the new business news site Quartz has exceeded its traffic expectations during its first month of operation.
Bazilian writes, “The site received 840,343 unique visitors in the month of October. That’s about half of the 1.6 million uniques that the Financial Times saw in September, but notably more than the Economist’s 559,000 visitors, per Compete.com.
“‘We were aiming for half a million unique visitors in the first month and really overshot that,’ said Jay Lauf, svp and publisher of Quartz, who added that the site’s visitor growth has been the fastest of any Atlantic digital launch he’s overseen.
“About 30 percent of Quartz traffic is coming from mobile devices, according to the company, but Lauf believes that percentage will increase as users continue to migrate to mobile devices. The site’s Android issues have also been addressed although functionality on Internet Explorer doesn’t sound like a priority. (Paraphrasing Elevation Partners’ co-founder Roger McNamee, Lauf explained, ‘Every dollar, every man hour and every bit of intellectual energy you’re spending on legacy systems is money, time and energy you’re not spending on your future.’)
“Other statistics from Quartz’s first month show an audience that’s global, with more than 40 percent of unique visitors coming from outside the U.S., and active on social media, with nearly 40 percent of the site’s visitors from social referrals.”
Read more here.
Quartz editor confident of business model
by Chris Roush
Sarah Shearman of MediaWeek writes about the launch of the new business news site Quartz and spoke with editor Kevin Delaney about its potential.
Here is an excerpt:
How would you describe Quartz?
“Quartz is a digitally-native business news site for global business professionals. We are focused on the most important macro themes shifting the new global economy.
“The site is optimised for tablets and also works well on desktops and mobile.”
What is the business set-up?
“We have about 30 people including developers, editorial and sales staff, working at Quartz. We have people in Europe, Asia and the US, with headquarters in New York.
“The centres of gravity of the global economy have shifted. The financial crisis of the past few years has pushed that into further focus.
“We’re looking to provide information and analysis for professionals to better navigate this. Instead of using traditional editorial feeds, our reporters are focused on an obsession.
“Examples of the obsessions are the energy shock, China slowdown or an obsession around mobile web and how the one billion users of the internet will come online.”
Read more here.
WSJ reporter joins Quartz
by Chris Roush
Matt Phillips, a Wall Street Journal reporter on the Money & Investing team, has joined Quartz to cover similar finance, markets and economics.
Phillips joined The Atlantic’s new business news site shortly before its launch on Sept. 24, a spokeswoman told Talking Biz News.
Phillips had been with the Journal since December 2005. Before that, he spent 23 months with the Bakersfield Californian.
At The Journal for seven years, he covered the aftermath of the Great Recession and the relentless descent of U.S. interest rates.
Other descents he covered at the Journal include the January 2009 splashdown of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River and Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
Phillips caught the markets bug as lead writer for the Journal’s MarketBeat blog, which he helped turn into one of the most heavily trafficked web properties at the Journal.
Quartz is nice, but it’s not a must read
by Adam Levy
There are many reasons that I really, really want to like Quartz, Atlantic Media’s new business website.
First of all, I like the magazine — which is usually very well written and full of unexpected and provocative points of view. Second, of all, well, it’s business news and in a world full of journalistic shrinkage, I welcome the commitment to more financial journalism.
Third, there are some stellar journalists behind this effort — people who have done great work over the years — and I’d love to encourage them.
But, after a week of popping around the site, I’m not ready to commit to bookmarking this site. It boils down to the same reason I don’t subscribe to the Atlantic magazine, despite enjoying the read when I pick it up at a newsstand every now and then: there is some great writing and cool graphics, but it ultimately failed to convince me that it’s a must read.
I had trouble figuring out what it was I had to read. I’m old school, for sure, and rely on the news judgment of new organizations to help me with my time management. Bloomberg’s top stories and the WSJ’s layout are intuitive, easy to follow.
At Quartz, it’s not so clear. The “defining obsessions” across the toolbar isn’t really what I’m obsessed about. I clicked on one and up popped Bloomberg News article I had already read. I clicked on another and got a neat enough graphic showing three other magazine covers progressively ragging on China.
What clinched it for me was on Sunday when I clicked on “The Next Crisis” and got a two-day-old story from Bloomberg on BofA paying $2.43 billion to settle with investors over its buyout of Merrill Lynch. Huh? Isn’t that the LAST crisis? What’s new about it? No added commentary, no perspective – just a stale two-day-old story that made me wonder if someone stuffed it under the heading by accident.
The same day I clicked on “Lifestyle” and got a list of trivia about “The Princess Bride.”Now, I love that movie, but come on, this and the BofA story don’t scream “you have to bookmark” me. Plus, can’t I get that trivia from imdb.com, and not from a business-centric web site?
For the time being, I’ll leave my biz-news bookmark alone and have Bloomberg, FT, WSJ.com, Reuters and AP in there.
I know better than to rely on first impressions, so I’ll give Quartz another shot. But for now and for me, it just doesn’t belong on the same stage as the others.
Quartz is a technological and structural innovator
by Chris Roush
Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab critiques the new business news site Quartz, which launched on Monday.
Benton writes, “While Quartz’s design cues and content structures are interesting to news nerds and web types, it’ll be the content that’ll ultimately determine how it’ll do. That’s hard to judge on Day 1, but the mix of content seems just as global as promised and nearly as high-end. (It’s so high-end it doesn’t allow comments. For Quartz’s desired audience, it’s probably welcome to soar above the ground-bound commenting riff-raff.) It’s also not above a little Atlantic-style clickbait now and then.
“As C.W. Anderson wrote here last week, Quartz is organizing its editorial capacity around what it calls ‘obsessions’ rather than beats. That is an interesting idea, but it’s one that in practice is less of a big deal than some first thought.
“Chris (C.W.) writes that an obsessions model could help free reporting from an institutional structure (the cops beat, the courts beat, the schools beat, etc.) that influences which stories are told and why. True, but that’s also a bigger deal for a newspaper than for an operation like Quartz that has only about 20 staffers, yet claims as its coverage area something as amorphous and all-encompassing as global business.
“Of course they’re not going to tie up their reporters with the captain-of-industry equivalent of school board meetings — they’re going to pick their shots, as Businessweek or Fortune do. Remember Quartz is more a magazine than anything else: from staff size to parentage (Atlantic Media) to inspiration (see that list of magazines-in-their-age).
“Quartz’s list of ‘current obsessions’ doesn’t sound all that far from what would be considered beats at other news orgs: the mobile web, the Euro crunch, startups.”
Read more here.
