A digital news venture from Atlantic Media launched on September 24, promising "bracingly creative and intelligent journalism" for reading on devices such as tablets and mobile phones. The effort baptised Quartz "is a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy," the group said on its website, qz.com.
Editor in chief Kevin Delaney said the team of "digital journalists and developers" seeks to cover "core topics and knotty questions of seismic importance to business professionals, from the rise of digital payment systems to life in a world of extremely low interest rates to the growth and habits of the consumer class."
The website optimised for mobile phones and tablets launched with articles on "Facebook's plan to find its next billion users" and "Five ways a new age of cheap energy could shift the power balance on the planet." In addition to its original stories, Quartz offered links to articles from other news organisations including The New York Times, Financial Times and Business Insider, for example.
Delaney said Quartz "is totally free, with no paywall to get in your way. We're ad-supported, thanks to our four launch sponsors."
He added that Quartz "is intended to embody the era in which we're creating it, like Wired in the 1990s, Rolling Stone in the 1960s, Fortune in the 1930s, and The Economist in the 1840s."
The New York-based project has correspondents and staff reporters in London, Paris, Taiwan, Los Angeles, and Washington, and plans "to expand quickly to other locations." Analysts say the project has the potential to succeed, but that it won't be easy in the current media environment.