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.
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.
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.
