Quartz

Today, Quartz launches Quartz Index, an interactive tool providing readers with a view of some of the biggest drivers of change in the global economy.

Quartz readers are excited by change. As industries have become increasingly intertwined and the global order no longer determined by its traditional centers of gravity, there has emerged a need for a new, dynamic way of watching the world change. We’ve designed Quartz Index to complement traditional economic measures—GDP, PMI, exchange rates, and the like—with indicators that together tell the story of not just which direction the economy is headed, but how it’s getting there.

Quartz Index is a collection of eight numerical indicators, from drone registrations and SpaceX launches to Hong Kong retail sales and retirement fund investment decisions. These indicators will be updated regularly on the Quartz Index homepage. Quartz’s editorial team will also provide regular coverage of topics related to each indicator in accompanying stories on qz.com and a weekly email roundup of key changes.

“The Quartz Index tries to go beyond what’s up and what’s down to show you how the economy is changing in fundamental ways,” said Kevin Delaney, editor in chief of Quartz.

iShares by BlackRock is the exclusive launch sponsor for Quartz Index. “As the global leader in index products and ETFs, it makes sense for iShares to partner with Quartz on this project,” said Jason Hill, global head of media for BlackRock. “We felt that the ability to use this editorial feature to raise awareness on indexing and explain complex topics through data visualization, interactive units, and all-around excellent content would help us reach our target audience in a compelling new way.”

We’re thrilled that Quartz has won general excellence in the 2016 Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ Best in Business Awards. Better yet, it’s our third year in a row winning that category. We also won for best digital feature and were finalists for two other awards.

Quartz was named the winner in the following categories:

Digital - General Excellence: Quartz

Digital - Feature: Allison Schrager’s “Secrets of the Dark Web”

Quart also was named a finalist in the following categories:

Digital - Explanatory: Gwynn Guilford’s “The Enigma Behind America’s Freak, 20-year Lobster Boom”

Digital - Feature: Mike Murphy and Jacob Templin’s “IBM’s Path Back to Greatness”

For the general excellence award, the judges wrote, “Quartz’s entry, across all its formats, showed an impressive depth of reporting and originality. Quartz finds creative ways to explain complex ideas without over-simplifying them.”

Jay Lauf and Kevin Delaney, co-presidents of Quartz, just sent this memo to our staff, and we wanted to share it with our readers, as well. As always, thanks for your support getting us to these big new milestones!

Fellow Quartzians,

As we close out the third quarter and  mark our third anniversary, we wanted to commend everyone on the achievement of three (see a pattern?) particularly important numerical markers.

Many other impressive stats were outlined in a thank you post to readers last week, but in closing the books on September, these numbers jumped out at us: 16,000,000, 42, and 21.

The first represents a new traffic record for qz.com, which attracted 16 million unique visitors in September. That extraordinary growth, every last bit of it organic, is the result of both hard and smart work by our writers and editors. It also continues the consistent pattern of growth for Quartz: New heights introduce us to new readers, which resets the traffic floor at a higher foundation, and we keep going from there. This matters deeply on two levels: The larger audience means our journalism can have greater impact, and it also means we can achieve our business goals.

We are setting new records on the commercial side, as well. Revenue year-to-date is up 80% over last year. More than 120 blue chip brands are now advertising with Quartz, and 90% of them renew their business with us. Advertisers are not just trying Quartz, they are making us an integral part of their marketing efforts.

But the other two really interesting numbers we wanted to highlight relate to achievements in mobile and in international sales. We read again and again about other publishers struggling to generate revenue through their mobile offerings even as readers increasingly migrate to those devices. Not so for us. Quartz now generates 42% of our total ad revenue from readers on mobile devices, which makes us a standout in the publishing world. This is a huge indicator of future success.

Lastly, kudos to our international sales and marketing teams, who have continued to capitalize on the large audiences we’re attracting around the world. Most US-based publishers we talk to are struggling to generate significant revenue from their international traffic, but at Quartz, 21% of our total revenue comes from our operations outside the US, and that number is growing. It looks like as much as 28% of our Q4 revenue will come from markets outside the US.

So as we turn three years old, remember those numbers: 16,000,000, 42, and 21. They are indicators of a very solid foundation for continued growth. As we find ourselves saying over and over again, we’re proud of this entire team and hope you are just as proud of all that we’re accomplishing together!

It was an LA awards show just as glamorous as the Oscars, if not as ritzy. At the Online News Association’s annual conference in Los Angeles last week, we came away with two of the most prestigious honors in digital journalism.

Quartz won Online Journalism Awards in our size category for general excellence and for excellence and innovation in visual digital storytelling. The first award was for all of our work, and the judges said, “Few sites set the standard for web work like this one.” The second was for a series of stories (here, here, and here) on the burgeoning space business, by David Yanofsky, Tim Fernholz, Sam Williams, and Nikhil Sonnad.

To mark the honors, we received two swords/awards, sometimes referred to as “nerd knives,” which TSA thankfully let us bring back to New York.

We are thrilled to introduce a whole new way to read Quartz: within Apple’s News app, which is launching today in the United States.

The News app is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. After downloading iOS 9, the app will automatically appear on your homescreen. Inside, you can follow topics and sources for a personalized reading experience. Quartz is among the first news organizations to publish directly into the app, and nearly everything you love to read on our website can also be read natively in News.

If you have the app, tap here to view our channel.

This is an exciting new home for us. iPhones and iPads are already the most popular devices for reading Quartz, and the News app should lead to more people seeing more of our stories. We’ve spent a lot of time making sure that everything looks beautiful and is easy to read. The app itself is a breeze to use and filled with lots of great journalism by Quartz and other sources.

Qualcomm will be the first sponsor featured in Quartz’s channel, with beautiful ads that live natively in the app. Other advertisers will also be featured in the coming weeks.

“For Qualcomm’s first brand campaign, we skipped right to the newest and most inventive opportunities out there, offering Qualcomm maximum brand impact and exposure,” says Daniele Kohen, managing director for Neo@Ogilvy, Los Angeles. “Quartz has consistently been one of the more innovative partners to work with and so it makes sense to run with them in the launch of Apple News, which has the potential to be a great new way to engage with Qualcomm's core audience.”

Apple News is our latest extension beyond qz.com, part of a strategy we discussed at length earlier this year. We want to reach you wherever you are, in whatever form you prefer to read us. As apps like News become popular, we will be there.

We just sent out the following press release, announcing that Quartz Africa will launch in June. In the meantime, sign up here to receive updates and follow @qzafrica on Twitter for our ongoing coverage of the continent.

Quartz Africa to launch in June 2015

The digital global business publication expands its coverage of Africa with regional content and targeted native ads

March 11, 2015—Quartz, Atlantic Media’s digital global business news brand, will launch Quartz Africa this June with region-specific content and targeted native ads. Quartz, with founding partner GE, plans to provide both global and Africa-specific business news coverage to readers of the Quartz Africa site.

More than 40% of Quartz’s readers are from outside the US and in just over two years, the site has attracted more than 100,000 monthly unique users from Africa. Following its successful launch in June 2014, Quartz India has expanded to reach more than 1.3 million readers monthly, growing more than 500% in just eight months.

The rise of the African consumer economy is one of the biggest, and most under-covered, stories that are critical for business readers. By 2020, seven of the world’s top 10 fastest growing economies will be in sub-Saharan Africa. The continent already has more mobile subscribers than the US or the EU.

“As a global business publication, we have an editorial imperative to cover the most interesting and important developments in the global economy,” says Jay Lauf, Quartz co-president and publisher. “As a digital and mobile-first publication, Quartz has great commercial potential in Africa.”

Yinka Adegoke has joined Quartz to be its Africa editor. Adegoke previously held senior positions at Reuters and Billboard and has written for publications including The Guardian and The Financial Times. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, Adegoke will lead the Quartz Africa team, consisting of journalists, freelancers, and contributors from across the continent.

Modeled after the Quartz India experience, Quartz Africa will be automatically viewable to readers in Africa via qz.com, and its content will be available to readers outside the region through the Quartz Africa view via qz.com/africa.

"It’s a truly thrilling time to cover the continent with the youngest demographics and several of the world’s fastest-growing economies,” said Adegoke. “Those dynamics are just beginning to unleash pent-up creativity, and are driving innovation and attracting smart investors from around the globe.”

GE, Quartz Africa’s premier founding partner, is known for having a focus on innovative native ad formats, media programs and content marketing as well as a commitment to partnering with Africa to deliver outcomes around infrastructure, technology and skill development.

“We’ve seen great engagement and attention with our Quartz India partnership and we are excited to partner with Quartz as they expand to Africa,” said Jason Hill, GE’s director of global media strategy. “We will be using Quartz’s innovative platform and content tools to tell stories around GE innovations, technology, and partnerships within this vastly growing market. We have a particular commitment to localization and skills training in Africa and believe these topics are rife for exploration via great content and the great editorial that has become a hallmark of Quartz.”

Quartz, launched in 2012, covers global business topics rooted in a set of defining coverage obsessions. The site is focused on the new global economy and geared toward business leaders and senior decision makers across a range of industries and markets. Quartz has more than 10 million unique visitors monthly and more than 40 journalists around the world who produce quality content 24/7. Its content is optimized for access on tablets and mobile devices.

More information on the launch of Quartz Africa will be provided in the coming months. Sign up here to receive updates. You can follow Quartz Africa on Twitter at @qzafrica.

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For more information and press inquiries, please contact:

Emily Passer Director of Communications Quartz 646-539-6614 [email protected]

We’re approaching the second anniversary of Quartz’s launch this month. To kick things off, our team in New York will ring the closing bell at the Nasdaq stock exchange today.

We’ll be celebrating this anniversary with real confidence and hope for the future:

Quartz had 6.8 million unique visitors in August, according to Omniture, well above our own targets and more than double just a year earlier. Revenue has nearly quadrupled from last year, with over 65 advertising accounts.

We very recently launched a site redesign that has attracted broad user praise (thank you!) and our journalism has been sparking discussion and earning honors. Just a few months old, Quartz India has been publishing scoops and exceeding our readership targets. Our popular email newsletter, the Daily Brief, is closing in on 90,000 subscribers. And we’re well into a wave of hiring that once complete will add about 20 new staff to our ranks. Managing editor Bobby Ghosh and global news editor Heather Landy are among the respected, experienced journalists who joined Quartz recently.

We remain very thankful for your readership and support. Quartz is for people who are excited by change—in business and the global economy, and how they’re covered. You have our commitment that Quartz itself will keep changing and improving as it enters its third year.

Kevin Delaney just sent this memo to our staff...

Hello Quartz -

Some staff news:

Bobby Ghosh is joining us as managing editor of Quartz, starting next month. He is currently editor of Time International, overseeing all of its editions and correspondents outside of the US.

Bobby is one of the most-experienced journalists at covering international affairs and the new global economy, having lived as a correspondent in Baghdad, London, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Washington DC. Raised in India, his assignments have taken him to much of the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, including years spent in war zones.

It’s likely you’ve read some of Bobby’s high-impact stories, such as this account of his time in Baghdad, his piece on American Islamophobia, and the profile of soccer star Lionel Messi. And you might also have seen some of his many television appearances, such as those on the Charlie Rose Show and CBS’s Face the Nation. Bobby’s TED talk on “The End of Jihad” has been viewed by more than half a million people. You can follow his tweets about world affairs, sports, and food at @ghoshworld.

Bobby brings a sophisticated curiosity about the world, an obsessive news focus, and a strong identification with Quartz’s mission to cover the new global economy’s most important and interesting facets.

He has extensive experience in managing teams of journalists, and a reputation for being the advocate of the correspondents he’s edited. (He also has an extensive collection of red socks.) Bobby will report to me and oversee our main newsroom staff. (Gideon, Mitra, and Zach will continue to report to me as well.)

Bobby’s mandate is to engage deeply with Quartz’s journalism and increase the breadth, creativity, and impact of our coverage, guiding our reporters to their greatest work. His arrival comes as we’re expanding the editorial team to produce even more high-quality journalism that finds a broad readership online. And it will allow us to further our ambitions outside the US, as marked by this week’s launch of Quartz India.

Please join me in welcoming Bobby.

We just launched Quartz India, which can be found at qz.com in the subcontinent and qz.com/india everywhere else. See here for a welcome letter from the editors, and below is the press release.

Quartz India is live! Regional content to serve as economic news source for Indian and global business executives

June 9, 2014 — Quartz, Atlantic Media’s digital global business news brand, has launched Quartz India. This new, expanded vertical provides both global and India-specific business news coverage and features targeted native advertising.

“We're deeply committed to providing sophisticated coverage of India to our readers there and around the world,” says Kevin J. Delaney, President and Editor-in-Chief of Quartz. “And we're very optimistic that through Quartz India, more Indian business people will come to value Quartz's creative, digital, visual, data-rich approach to covering the region and the global economy."

Automatically accessible for users in India at qz.com, or at qz.com/india for readers outside the country, Quartz India serves two purposes – to provide business leaders in India focused coverage of their region and its impact on the global economy, and to provide global leaders insight on the impact of India developments on businesses worldwide. It is produced in collaboration with Scroll.in’s team of reporters and editors, and led by Sruthijith KK, a New Delhi-based reporter formerly from The Economic Times, Mint and other business news publications. Content includes business, markets and technology news and analysis.

As part of its mission to provide quality reporting and analysis about the global economy to readers around the globe, Quartz has several journalists and contributors outside the US, and now with the launch of Quartz India, the brand continues its global expansion into one of the world’s largest economies.

Quartz, together with founding partner of Quartz India, GE, sees the growing importance of this market and is investing resources to serve it more widely.

Quartz’s readership in India has grown around 200% year-over-year, numbering 200,000 unique visitors a month. On Quartz’s social pages, engagement from India consistently ranks in the top five regions on Twitter and is number two on Facebook. Top performing articles are focused on management and tech. Readers of India-focused content on Quartz have proven to be among the most interactive with those stories, garnering some of the most annotations per story the site has received.

“We’re delighted to be partnering with GE on this foray into one of the most vibrant and important markets in the world,” says Jay Lauf, President and Publisher of Quartz. “We believe our high quality versus commodity approach to both journalism and advertising will resonate with the sophisticated audiences we aim to attract.”

In addition to the native advertising products Quartz has become known for – BULLETIN, branded content, and ENGAGE, fill-the-screen high-impact units – Quartz India will feature distinct branding, special “obsessions,” and a dedicated queue of stories specific to that region. All will build on the success of Quartz’s elegant approach to digital publishing.

GE, Quartz India’s founding partner, is among the pioneers of innovation in the region. Through a multi-part sponsor content series, GE will explore key areas of innovation in India including renewable energy, manufacturing and healthcare.

“We are excited to partner with Quartz as they launch a high-quality, high-engagement brand focused on the India market,” says Jason Hill, Director of Global Media Strategy for GE. “We believe the combination of Quartz’s editorial and GE’s branded content will be compelling to an audience of visionary business decision-makers in India and globally. GE’s presence in India dates back to 1902 and today the market is home to our largest global R&D center and over 13,000 employees. The partnership with Quartz is a great way to tell stories around GE’s innovation and technology in India and the breakthrough work our scientists are doing every day.”

Quartz, launched in 2012, covers global business topics rooted in a set of defining obsessions, focusing on the new global economy and geared toward business leaders and senior decision-makers across a range of industries and markets. Quartz has a growing staff of journalists around the world who produce quality content 24/7, and this content is optimized for access on tablets and mobile devices. Quartz has approximately five million unique visitors globally each month and is tracking to be up more than 400% year-over-year in terms of advertising revenue.

Visit Quartz India now by going to qz.com/india or follow @qzindia on Twitter.

For more information and press inquiries, please contact:

Short version: We're hiring! For a lot of new positions, some of which are already posted here. More will be posted soon.

Slightly longer version: Jay Lauf, our publisher, and Kevin Delaney, our editor-in-chief, sent out this memo today...

Fellow Quartzians:

In recognition of, and enabled by, our incredible growth, we are planning to add some fuel to the rocket ship in the form of staff expansion. Your outstanding efforts in growing the Quartz audience to around 5m unique users/month, building our advertiser base to more than 60 accounts, and launching multiple new ventures—including Glass and the upcoming Quartz India—mean we're ready to inject more intellectual capital into the operation.

In addition to the positions already available, these 20+ new roles will help us continue our global expansion and enhance our ability to deliver a differentiated, high-quality experience for readers and advertisers alike. The new opportunities will span the sales, marketing, product engineering, and editorial departments in NY, SF, London and beyond. We welcome your help in identifying top-notch talent—people who are smart, creative, generous of spirit, and entrepreneurial—for any of these positions. You can see the full list of available positions here.

Thank you again for your continued efforts,

Kevin Delaney, our editor in chief, just sent out the following memos...

Dan Frommer joins Quartz as tech editor

Hello Quartz!

Some editorial staff news:

Dan Frommer is joining us as Technology Editor for Quartz in New York, starting this Friday. He will lead the band of tech and science reporters, including Leo and Rachel and one of our excellent interns.

Dan is an experienced tech writer, beginning at Forbes and then from 2007 as one of the founding staff (with Henry Blodget and Peter Kafka) of Silicon Alley Insider, which later became Business Insider. He coded early versions of the site and wrote 5,700 posts while there.

Dan launched his own tech news site in 2011 called SplatF (Why "SplatF.") We'd love to have had on Quartz much of what he's published there. Dan's posts are rooted in scoops of analysis—and charts. This Netflix/AOL subscriber chart is my favorite example. We're looking to Dan for much more of this great analytical and visual coverage of the tech industry for Quartz.

Dan also created the City Notes iPhone app, which he plans to keep going in his spare time—and which makes him a great source of travel advice for all of you. You can follow him at @fromedome

Please join me in welcoming Dan.

Best, Kevin

Annalisa Merelli joins Quartz as reporter

Hello Quartz—

I'm happy to announce that Annalisa Merelli has joined Quartz as a reporter on the Ideas team. She will report to S. Mitra Kalita and Lauren Brown, and commission and coordinate with contributors and their pieces, as well as bring her creative eye to stories such as Narendra Modi's hats and the history of Helvetica on subway maps.  Annalisa has most recently been an editor for Narratively and UN Global Pulse. She is a native of Italy and lived in New Delhi for four years, working at various Wieden & Kennedy publications focused on art, culture, and politics. She also spent some time as a blogger for Benetton in Italy, and has her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Bologna.   Annalisa is creative and dogged, and has been crucial to keeping the Ideas section churning over the last few months. She seemingly doesn't sleep and is a voracious consumer of news and social media from around the world. You can follow her at @missanabeem

Please join me in congratulating Annalisa on joining Quartz.

Best,

Kevin

Matt Phillips is now Quartz's markets and finance editor

Hello Quartz -

I'm happy to announce that Matt Phillips is now Quartz's markets and finance editor, leading a core team that includes John, Mark, and now Max—and helping coordinate the work of other writers when they cover markets and finance-related topics.

As he's been doing for the past few months, Matt will act as a player-coach, continuing to write while providing coverage guidance, coordination, and some of the story editing for the group. He'll also continue to provide coverage suggestions and story ideas to the broader Quartz staff.

Matt's promotion is a recognition of the exceptional work he's done since Quartz's launch, in writing signature pieces such as his economic analysis of Ghostbusters and take on the Japanese life insurance industry. It's also in recognition of his natural leadership and focus on pursuing what's most meaningful for serving and expanding Quartz's readership. If for some reason you're not following him already, he's at @matthewphillips

Matt's expanded role comes at a moment when we're working on quickly expanding the ranks of our journalists. We'll increasingly use such editorial groups—and circles made of looser federations of reporters around a given obsession or coverage area—to provide structure as we grow, but allow us to remain nimble and focused on what's best for our readers.

Please join me in congratulating Matt.

It's been a good year for Quartz on the awards circuit. So far in 2014, we have received nine awards and honors, including: 

Our Chartbuilder software—created by David Yanofsky, open-sourced, and now used by CNBC, NPR, New Yorker, WSJ, 538, and others—won first prize for best publishing technology at the Digiday awards. Quartz was also a finalist for best advertising innovation by a publisher for our work with KPMG.

Quartz's article "By reading this page you are mining bitcoins" is a finalist for a Deadline Club Award in the Digital Innovation category. 

In this year's Webby Awards, Quartz's Daily Brief is a nominee in the Email Newsletters category and Quartz is an honoree in the Mobile News category. 

Quart'z Daily Brief is also a finalist in the minOnline Best of the Web & Digital awards. 

Quartz was a SABEW winner in the Digital General Excellence (large) category and a finalist in the Digital Feature category for the article "By reading this page you are mining bitcoins. "

Commenting platform Livefyre just launched Sidenotes, a new feature for annotating text and images. We couldn't be more thrilled.

You may remember that we added the ability to annotate Quartz stories in August 2013. That followed similar functionality on Medium, Soundcloud, Rap Genius, and others. Our hope all along has been that even more sites would adopt annotations, introducing more people to the concept.

We're proud of how the Quartz Daily Brief has grown and evolved, now publishing six days a week in three time zones around the world. And our readers seem to love it, too. But our subscriber list wasn't growing quite as fast as we hoped, and there was one major reason why: the signup process had way too much friction.

Version 1

When we launched Quartz in 2012, we wanted to build an account framework that could handle all our future aspirations—personalization, geolocation, read-it-later, offline mode, annotations, user settings, and a variety of email subscriptions. We tossed out a lot of ideas, some of which we planned to pursue immediately and others we said we'd do later.

As we set out to build the account system, it only made sense to make creating an account a requirement for email signup. If we were going to eventually build in other functionality centered around a specific user, it made sense to have everything tied together, right? 

This is probably the way most people get to such a problem: planning so much for what you might want to build down the line that you instead make the user experience less appealing for the functionality you have available right now. In reality, requiring accounts just slowed down the Daily Brief signup process for a lot of people, frustrated others, and turned many off from signing up entirely.

Near the end of 2013, we decided to redesign the email signup and account registration flows in an effort to make them more appealing. But it quickly became obvious that the problem was not about the aesthetics. If we wanted more email subscribers, we'd have to make it easier for people to subscribe.

Version 2

As with architecting any registration system from scratch, it's easy to fall into the user flow trap very quickly—that is, feeling obligated to account for every possible edge case a user may find themselves in, rather than designing a few common flows simple enough that users don't find themselves wandering off the path.

We agreed that we would break off the email signup process from accounts entirely. Accounts would now govern our annotations product and any other features down the road that truly demand an account.

This resulted in three major changes for email signups:

Require only an email address for signup

Move from a double opt-in (requires users to click a link in an email to fully activate a subscription) to opt-out (subscriptions are automatically active unless a user reverses the action)

Allow for optional marketing fields that add no friction to the conversion process

The results

Since we rolled out the new system on February 19, our daily subscriber rate has doubled, even on weekends when activity dips considerably. Users can now sign up via "in-stream units" (pictured above) or through the Daily Brief landing page. Of the people that view that page, a full 60% of them now go on to subscribe. In the chart below, you can see the noticeable effects these small tweaks have made to our growth.