This month we are proud to celebrate Quartz’s fifth birthday and share with you our latest plans.
When we launched Quartz, on Sept. 24, 2012, the world was just emerging from a financial crisis that made clear traditional ways of doing business would no longer stand. We promised you a new kind of business news organization that would challenge assumptions, embrace technological change, and stand for a more open and connected world. Five years on, that mission feels more important than ever.
Quartz now reaches more than 100 million of you every month across various platforms. Just last month, our website had 22 million unique visitors. We also serve you through email, apps, videos, audio, and charts—with each experience tailored to the specific medium. We’re very proud of our success in showing that high-quality journalism can thrive in the digital era with a bold and creative approach, one which other media companies now look to as a model.
But the point of this note is not nostalgia or self-congratulation, but to give an update on how we plan to serve you in the coming years.
First, we want to announce a few exciting developments:
- Quartz has published a book. The Objects that Power the Global Economy is a beautiful and deeply reported book about 10 objects changing how we communicate, what we eat, the way we spend our money, and so on. The stories are told through reporting by our global staff, original photography and illustration by award-winning artists, contributions from visionaries including Bill Gates, data visualization, and interactive features. Since the early days of Quartz, we’ve mused about how our approach to journalism and visual storytelling might manifest itself in print, taking unique advantage of the physical form. Objects is the result of that thought experiment. You can order a copy for yourself starting now.
- Later this month, we will start offering an afternoon complement to our Daily Brief. This new email, called Quartz Obsession, dives into a single topic with which we’re obsessed and think you should be, too. It’s a daily digression into the most fascinating corners of the global economy. We’re also using the Obsession email to try out new forms of interactivity that aren’t typically found in your inbox. Daily Brief subscribers will get it automatically, and others can sign up in advance.
- In October, we are launching a new edition, Quartz at Work. This effort, supported by a dedicated team of journalists, will greatly expand our coverage of management, leadership, careers, and the workplace. Our stories about these topics are already among the most popular with Quartz readers, and we see a clear opportunity to apply our global, future-focused approach to even more aspects of modern leadership. Quartz at Work will have its own homepage and social channels to make it easier for readers to track this coverage.
- In November, we are launching another new edition, Quartzy, to expand our coverage of life and culture. Quartzy’s mission is to help you live well in the global economy, with good taste, ethics, health, and humor. We’ll help you spend your time and money wisely with a focus on the luxuries that make our lives richer—fashion, travel, food, culture, design, entertainment, books, technology—and the even-more-important intangibles like family, friendships, and well-being. Quartzy, too, has its own team of journalists and builds on our popular email by the same name.
- We have produced three ambitious video series that are debuting this fall. In the Deep will take viewers from the depths of the ocean to vibrant coral reefs, probing the most enduring mysteries of the sea. What Happens Next, a collaboration with Retro Report, explains what the world’s most transformative technologies will mean for the rest of us. Finally, On the Edge takes you to the world’s last unexplored places. These series by our talented video team will appear variously on Facebook, YouTube, and of course QZ.com.
There’s even more coming this fall that we’re not quite ready to share yet. You can sign up to get notified when we launch new products.
Amid this all, we remain committed to serving users coming to our main website and expanding our core business news coverage. QZ.com will continue to get faster and easier to use. And we’ll keep investing in our newsroom resources, as we have, for example, expanded our finance and economics reporting team over the past year.
Quartz was founded, in part, to champion the values of a new global economy. We believe that the open movement of people, ideas, and goods is the most powerful cure for war and economic stagnation. We’ve argued throughout for lucid, compassionate policies that acknowledge the downsides of globalization and technological advances, but our conviction is that the world is better off with fewer barriers to trade, immigration, and the exchange of ideas among people. Despite major setbacks in recent years, our staff, spread among five continents, remains emboldened by the importance of this mission. And we know you do, too.
Quartz was also founded to serve a new type of business leader, one who embraces a different set of values and exhibits a new set of skills suited to rapid and radical change in the world. Our reader surveys indicate that Quartz is clearly resonating with such a group: decision-makers with international backgrounds and responsibilities, who are tech savvy, value design and user experience, and who are on the whole younger and more female than readers of traditional business news.
In surveys and conversations over the past five years, we have observed that our users share some things in common: You don’t assume things should be done the way they always have been. You’re intensely curious about industries and societies outside of your own, knowing they are invaluable sources of ideas. In short, you are excited by change in your life and your work.
We also can’t wait for all of the change that the next five years will bring. Our promise is to continue applying journalism and technology to cover it all for you.
Thank you for your support. We really appreciate it.
Best,
Kevin J. Delaney
Editor in chief
@delaney
kevind@qz.com