The Atlantic wanted to corner a more premium space, selling marquee advertisers on a
new generation of yacht owners and Rolex wearers. A free and digital Economist for the
budding millennial business elite. The concept oozed an Obama-era ethos of global
interconnectivity. “When you walk through a busy Asian airport, nobody is talking about or
thinking about the American economy. The world has gotten much bigger than that,” David
Bradley, then the owner of the Atlantic magazine, told the New York Times upon the launch
of Quartz. Under the leadership of editor-in-
chief Kevin Delaney, a former Wall Street Journal editor, and publisher Jay Lauf, formerly
of the Atlantic, the project began with a staff of 20 journalists and four premium sponsors
— Boeing, Cadillac, Chevron and Credit Suisse.
Staffers from the early years say that Quartz calacatta luxury was marked by a culture of experimentation
and innovation codified by an internal buzzword — “quartziness” — a nebulous term
loosely defined as the meeting of creativity, quirkiness and intelligence.
In August 2013, when Steve Ballmer stepped down from Microsoft, Quartz’s headline
highlighted the CEO’s personal windfall from the surging stock: “Steve Ballmer just made
$625 million by firing himself.” The clever take helped Quartz’s version of the story
rise above the rest in the early days of headlines engineered for the social web, where
hundreds of thousands of pageviews, if not millions, hinged on framing. “That was a very
archetypal way we responded to breaking news,” said Gideon Lichfield, then an editor at
Quartz and now the editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review. “We talked a lot in those
days about ‘quartziness.’ To figure out the unexpected take or angle on something and
write that.”
A Quartz style guide from the time encouraged reporters to “write at the intersection
of the important and the interesting” and to “think social.” Stories should fall on the
“Quartz curve,” meaning either short (less than 500 words) or long (more than 800 words),
but not in the middle, a rejection of the typical length of a newspaper story in the
mobile-reader ecosystem. The newsroom eschewed “desks” or “beats” and organized around
“obsessions.” Africa’s economy is a beat, according to the style guide, but Chinese
investment in Africa is an obsession — a phenomenon shaping readers’ lives and
industries. “Obsessions” shift, while beats remain constant, in theory making Quartz’s
newsroom more agile but in practice also permitting reporters to be more scattered.
Quartz quickly gained a reputation among media navel-gazers as one of the most
forward-thinking newsrooms on the “future of news.” The company was regularly lauded
across the trade press, including by Digiday, for experimenting with technology in ways
both useful (compelling visual ads) and charming (a light in the newsroom letting staffers
know when it was going to rain).
Before data-related editorial roles became industry standard,
Quartz carrara melded the
product into the newsroom, primarily through its “Things” team led by Seward. A
combination journalism and coding squad, Things introduced a tool that allowed reporters to
quickly publish their own crude charts. In traditional newsrooms at the time, placing a
graphic into a story could be a time-intensive group endeavor. Given that a headline
promising “one chart perfectly explaining” a certain topic was then a reliable traffic-
generating trope, the tool allowed Quartz reporters to be more nimble and independent.
Visuals and interactives spread across the industry, and Quartz helped set the standard for
what digital business journalism could look like. In short order, the company was
generating praise and awards.
“One of the great things that Quartz did was really inspire newsroom leaders around
the world to see news as a product and not just a chunk of text,” said Dan Frommer, a
Quartz editor from 2014 to 2016 who now writes a newsletter called The New Consumer. “The
fact that not only was everyone was allowed to — but was responsible for — their own
charts led to a data and math literacy that a lot of places don’t encourage or mandate.”
As Quartz’s profile grew, so did its traffic. Less than a year after launching, Quartz
hit 2 million unique visitors and surpassed the Economist, a moment seen at the time as a
changing of the guard. It signed on more advertisers like Ralph Lauren, KPMG and Rolex.
Over the next few years, the Facebook referral gods delivered Quartz and a horde of
other outlets booming traffic. The company expanded into new markets like India and Africa.
By late 2015, it had a staff of 60 on the editorial side writing 50 to 60 pieces of content
a day and was pulling in about 15 million monthly unique visitors. It dove into video and
by March 2016, amid the video explosion on Facebook, reached 200 million views across
platforms, the kind of milestone touted at the time by media executives who would later
come to learn the fickle nature of Facebook video views.
Competitors for ad dollars saw Quartz as a model publisher. “When I was running Slate,
I looked at them with admiration,” said Keith Hernandez, that site’s former president.
For the first two years of the business, Quartz rarely made concessions on price, scoring
CPMs of about $75, according to people familiar with the matter. Its in-house sponsored
content unit worked with big brands to fashion custom, sharp-looking (and less intrusive)
native and banner ads, rebuking IAB standard display ad units. When Quartz opened up its
chart building tool to the public, GE was the founding sponsor.
The quality-over-quantity advertising mantra worked and Quartz’s prosperity reassured
small and medium-sized newcomers that it was possible to score blue-chip clients with deep
pockets. “There was a realization that the growth on Facebook was not going to be
infinite, and that there might be a place for the middle class of publishing if you can
create beautiful ads,” Hernandez said.
Lost focus
Quartz celebrated its fifth birthday in September 2017 amid a wave of optimism.
“Quartz now reaches more than 100 million of you every month across various platforms.
Just last month, our website had 22 million unique visitors,” Delaney wrote in a memo
laying out the plans for the future. More expansion was on the horizon. There would be
Quartzy, a new vertical expanding life and culture coverage, as well as Quartz At Work, to
cover management and the workplace. An afternoon component was to be added to Quartz’s
popular Morning Brief email. More video series would debut across Facebook, YouTube and
Quartz’s site.
Meanwhile, the ownership structure at Quartz’s parent company had changed. A few
months earlier, David Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media, sold a majority stake in the
Atlantic magazine to Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Quartz
remained under the Atlantic Media umbrella, but Bradley made clear to those around him that
the next generation of his family had no interest in becoming media barons. Speculation
swirled that Quartz, an albatross around Bradley’s neck, was also for sale.
Market forces were also starting to shift. Facebook, humbled by the press for its
central role in the spread of misinformation, changed its News Feed algorithm in January
2018 to emphasize user content over publishers’. News companies coasting on the traffic
bonanza saw their audience drop. Quartz, for its part, had experienced this kind of
whiplash before. In the early days, the site picked up hefty referral numbers from LinkedIn
only to have that evaporate when the platform pivoted to hawking its own content. Before
the Facebook algorithm change, but especially after, publishers including
quartz other marble copy
renewed their interest in search optimization to diversify their referral sources.
For legacy sites, returning in part to a Google-driven model was familiar. That’s how it
was done before the Facebook gold rush (remember “What Time Is The Super Bowl?”). But
Quartz had missed much of that era of media.
“There was definitely a point where the shift in our referral traffic left us not
entirely sure what the levers were,” said Kira Bindrim, Quartz’s executive editor.
A slow contracting began on the business side. Native advertising became increasingly
competitive. Every publisher across the industry operated their own custom ad shop.
Campaigns at Quartz, one former business staffer said, needed extensive paid budgets to
ensure traffic. “For a brand, getting some award because of a nice looking campaign — the
value of that has diminished,” said the former staffer. “Brands aren’t willing to pay
for that thing if it’s not really benefiting their business beyond sentiment. These were
very expensive campaigns.”
Quartz’s ad work is high-touch, custom and by its nature difficult to scale. “The
composition of our advertising is still tried-and-true display units and content work. But
we have over the years adopted more standard ad units,” said Katie Weber, Quartz’s
current president who has been with the company since 2014. The site, for instance, now
offers a 300 x 600 mobile IAB unit, something that it did not a few years ago. The move
echoes other native digital publishers, like BuzzFeed, who were automated ad holdouts until
about two years ago.
Hernandez, formerly on the advertising side at BuzzFeed and Slate, said Quartz pushed
the advertising envelope, but that it struggled to clearly define where it sat in the
market. “Who were their competitors? Is it the Atlantic or Business Insider or are they up
against the WSJ or FT? The answer was kind of ‘yes,’ so they became a smaller piece of
the pie.” Brands today “love creative and the brand purpose, but at the end of the day
they’re going to spend their money on things that work, and the things that work are
Facebook and Google.”
The move to subs
In July 2018, Quartz announced that it had been acquired by Uzabase for a price between
$75 million and $110 million, based on future performance (final sale price: $86 million).
Uzabase had reached out to Quartz for a content partnership, and the talks turned into a
full-scale acquisition. It was a coup for Bradley. Sources with knowledge of the company
estimated that he was able to basically break even.
Staffers were stunned by the acquisition. Few had ever heard of Uzabase, which owns the
Japanese subscription service NewsPicks. “In Japan, people were really willing to pay for
the NewsPicks experience, and there are so many different alternatives in this market,”
said a former business side employee at Quartz. “Japanese culture has a different
relationship with media and less competition. I could just never see it taking off in the
U.S.”
In late 2018, quartz pure
color unveiled a paid membership offering — $14.99 a month or $99 a year —
promising more content and events for Quartz devotees. Six months later it put in place a
metered paywall. “The major change following the acquisition by Uzabase was to focus on
building the subscription business,” Seward said. “There’s no doubt that having
diversified revenue streams is critically important for us and any media business today.
Any strong subscription business has only ever been built slowly and steadily.”
Some reporters balked at the paywall and subscription model, as writers who want their
work seen by the most possible people often do. Others felt like the job itself had mostly
not changed. Newer features were given prominence, like “field guides,” deeply-reported
stories about the state of an industry or topic. Today, the Quartz homepage appears more
like a NewsPicks-style curation tool — highlighting stories from other outlets in addition
to Quartz — than a traditional publisher homepage.
As of the end of April, Quartz had 17,860 paid members. According to the latest Uzabase
filing, the site makes $118,000 in monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions. “We’re
covering the global economy for smart ambitious young professionals who want a more global
view of business journalism than they get elsewhere, and trying to be as useful to that
group as possible,” Seward said. Quartz is luring in new subscribers from places like its
existing newsletter audience, according to Weber. She aims to grow the subscription revenue
to 50/50 with advertising. “That doesn’t happen overnight and won’t happen this year,”
Weber said.
Quartz employees question their parent company’s patience. Uzabase said the goal for
the restructuring is to “build a foundation for profitability between 2021-2022.”
According to Uzabase’s 2019 financial report, total revenue at Quartz, which primarily
consists of advertising, dropped 22% to 26.9 million last year from $34.8 million in 2018
.
Quartz today, current and former employees say, looks and feels a lot different. In the
years since the acquisition, the company has shed some of the definitive products that made
it a frequent subject for the media press. The Quartz app, an award-winning mobile news
product in the style of a chatbot, was retired in 2019 in favor of a newer product built
around the NewsPicks app infrastructure. It debuted with fanfare: “Quartz Pros” like
Richard Branson and Sallie Krawcheck offered in-app commentary. But Quartz ended the
contributor program and the service now looks like a typical news publisher app. According
to Apptopia, the new Quartz app has been downloaded about 700,000 times since it launched
in November 2018.
As the culture shifted, the company in the past two years lost some of its key editors
to places like The New York Times, Reuters, and Medium, sapping morale. On the business
side, chief revenue officer Joy Robins decamped for the Washington Post. The newsroom also
had to deal with two tragedies, the deaths of editors Lauren Brown and Xana Antunes, both
from cancer. “Both of their deaths hit us really hard,” Seward said. “We felt those
deaths the way a family would feel them. I was really proud of how everyone was there for
each other.”
In October 2019, the attrition culminated with the exit of Delaney, now an advisor and
New York Times opinion section senior editor, and Lauf, who became chairman and later moved
to an advisory role. “They were really the heart and soul of Quartz, and it could never be
the same without them,” said one former staffer. Seward, a co-founder, was named CEO and
Weber was promoted to president.
Returned to unparalleled
By March of this year, Quartz employees were bracing for layoffs. Two smaller rounds of
layoffs in 2019 had already exposed some of the uncertainty surrounding the business. When
the pandemic broke out, Seward indicated that cuts were on the horizon (at the end of last
year, Quartz had 188 employees).
The layoffs were deeper than expected. Management rejected offers from the Quartz
editorial union to hold buyouts or a workshare program, tactics that had been utilized by
other struggling news outlets in Covid-19 times. The company declined to comment on
negotiations, but Seward said it made more sense to do one severe cut than several over a
longer period of time.
For now, the layoffs have left staffers feeling dazed. Practically the entirety of
Quartz’s geopolitics team was laid off ahead of an enormous political story. The award-
winning video team was also shown the door. “None of the cuts we made were easy or
obvious,” Seward said, adding that Quartz was proud of the quality of the video work but
that it had never been able to figure out a way to generate significant revenue from it
(particularly after Facebook curtailed its news video exploration).
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