Quartz

Hereistoday.com, an awesome design project by White Vinyl. Take a look at the powers of ten.

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Hereistoday.com, an awesome design project by White Vinyl. Take a look at the powers of ten.

Just a quick note to say that Quartz had a tremendous April, with 2.3 million unique visitors coming...

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:47:01 -0400

Just a quick note to say that Quartz had a tremendous April, with 2.3 million unique visitors coming to qz.com. It was our best month since launching just seven months ago. That’s all thanks to you, our readers, who keep spreading the word about Quartz and our journalism. We’re very appreciative.

Welcome to the new qz.com

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:02:00 -0400

Our strategy at Quartz is pretty simple: Make good stuff that people want to share. In designing the site, we’ve tried to stay true to that mission by getting out of your way and letting the stories shine. Ads, meanwhile, aren’t shunted to the side in small boxes but included in our stream, where you might actually enjoy them.

We also know that news sites are not like newspapers, in that web readers don’t usually care about sections. You come for a specific story—often following a link you found in social media—and, if we’re lucky, stick around for more. Data show us that most of you read more simply by scrolling into the next article.

So we had all that in mind when we turned toward improving the site’s navigation. Earlier this month, we redesigned the mobile experience of Quartz, and today we’re rolling out some changes on tablets and personal computers:

The header at the top of Quartz is now smaller, more efficient, and clearly labeled. Many of you told us that the previous header was distracting, so this new one is usually collapsed and out of your way. But tap or click to expand it, and you’ll quickly see how to navigate around the site.
Obsessions are now more prominent. We eschew most traditional sections at Quartz. Instead, we have specific subjects we’re obsessed with and hope you will be, too. Those obsessions are now clearly labeled in the navigation.
Everything is in one place. The black bar that used to grace the left side of Quartz is gone, which we hope makes the design even cleaner. But all of its features remain: You can view top, latest, popular, and starred stories by choosing any of those options in the new header. Search is there, too.

Today’s update is among the more visible changes we’ve made since launching seven months ago, but we’re actually making improvements all the time. The Quartz engineering team has made 73 code pushes since launch, many of which are documented in our public version history. And there’s much more to come this year as we respond to your feedback, study data about usage of the site, and build some very exciting new features.

We hope you like the changes and encourage you to send us feedback at hi@qz.com.

Quartz is hiring

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:43:00 -0400

We’re looking for an exceptional Senior Visual Designer and a Lifestyle + Management Editor to join us in our New York City headquarters.

We’re also looking for correspondents out of London and Hong Kong to join our growing global news team. Please share!

NYT on the flattening of design

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:50:00 -0400

NYT on the flattening of design:

It might sound audacious to think that Microsoft, the arbiter of uncool, was at the forefront of design a few years ago. But it was.

It turns out the company’s decision to focus on “flat design,” a type of visual scheme where everything has a smooth and even look, was a few years ahead of the rest of the technology and user interface industry.

While Microsoft was flattening its interfaces as if it were a child pushing down on a bulge of putty, its competitors – including Apple and Facebook — were focused on skeuomorphism, a type of look in which, say, a note-taking feature on a Web site or in an app would look like a spiral-bound notebook, a reference to the real world look of a notebook.

Now everyone seems to be following in those flat footsteps.

"The best things can’t be planned. The “sleeps” post began life as something Leo wrote, but making a..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:49:00 -0400

“The best things can’t be planned. The “sleeps” post began life as something Leo wrote, but making a different argument. David and Ritchie were separately working on an analysis of the tweets, but didn’t really know what to say about them. I suggested pairing the two. Zach saw a way to do that by giving the post a new spin.”

- Gideon Lichfield regarding “We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps” (via quartzthings)

We've made Quartz better on your phone

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:46:00 -0400

We’ve said from the start that Quartz is a mobile-first news organization, so it only makes sense that our first major redesign would be on your phone. Today we’re excited to roll out two big improvements to the mobile experience of Quartz:

an update to the user interface, including more intuitive navigation, a cleaner design, and more emphasis on the images that make our stories shine;
offline support on mobile and tablet devices, so you can take Quartz with you on a plane, in the subway, or anywhere else you’re not connected to the internet.

These changes reflect your feedback, our own aspirations, and data we’ve been collecting on mobile usage of Quartz since launching six months ago. The takeaways are clear: Keep it simple, put the content above all else, make it easy to share, and ensure that it all works for people on the go.

That last bit is why we’re particularly thrilled to introduce offline support, so Quartz will always be close at hand, whether you have a signal or not. When you open qz.com, all of our top stories are now automatically saved to your device. Open the site back up when you’re offline, and the stories will still be there. To make the most of this feature on iPhones and iPads, we recommend saving Quartz to your homescreen.

Today’s redesign is the most visible change to Quartz since we launched, but we’ve been making improvements on a regular basis. In February, we quietly released a complete revision of the code that makes qz.com work, speeding up the site and expanding browser support to include Internet Explorer 6 through 8. We also rolled out a number of improvements for older Android devices.

One thing you won’t find anywhere on the site are instructions or a walkthrough. Our goal was to make all of these features intuitive, and if they’re not or if you have any other feedback, please let us know at hi@qz.com and support@qz.com (for technical support).

Now that we’ve tackled the mobile redesign, we’ll soon be making similar updates to our desktop and tablet experiences, and we look forward to your feedback on those, as well.

Thanks for your support,
The Quartz Team

Quartz wins a 2013 Digiday Publishing Award for Best Design

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:18:00 -0400

Quartz was also a finalist for Most Disruptive Publishing Technology while our parent company, Atlantic Media, was a finalist for Publisher of the Year.

Hurricane Sandy was a mobile event for Quartz users and staff

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:29:35 -0500

Like so many other people in the Northeast US, the Quartz staff was displaced by Hurricane Sandy. We managed just fine and escaped the sort of devastation felt in some parts of the region, but today is our first day back in the office after a nomadic week.

Our headquarters in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan lost power on the night of Monday, Oct. 29. We were all at home by then, and the site was experiencing higher traffic than we’d seen since launch, boosted by widespread sharing of our collection of webcams along the East Coast and tips for keeping your phone charged. (At least 70% of our visitors on Oct. 29 came from social media, including 29% from Facebook and 27% from Twitter.) The site held up just fine, thanks to our developers working from home.

When the power went out around 9 p.m. ET on Oct. 29, we saw an immediate spike in visitors coming to Quartz from mobile phones—jumping to a third of all visitors in the 10 p.m. hour. (Only phones are included in “mobile” traffic here; tablets aren’t counted.)

You can imagine that New Yorkers suddenly without power had switched to their phones to keep tabs on the storm. That’s consistent with other sites, including our largest source of traffic that night, Twitter, which reported that mobile usage doubled in the hours following the power outage:

And while our spike in mobile traffic was likely concentrated in New York, visitors in the US only accounted for 58% of Quartz traffic last week. We saw intense interest in coverage of Sandy and other news from France, Canada, the UK, and Sweden.

Back in SoHo, our office was mostly spared by the storm: a window popped out of its frame, but the biggest issue was the lack of electricity. On boarded up windows around the neighborhood, a street artist offered helpful updates:

With the newsroom and some of our homes lacking power, the Quartz team spent the rest of the week in virtual-office mode. Christopher Mims detailed some our best tips for working from home in this piece.

To keep things running smoothly, we relied heavily on instant messaging and Google Hangouts, which we use twice a day even when a hurricane hasn’t swept through our newsroom. A lot of our staff always works remotely.

Power came back to SoHo and our office on Friday, Nov. 2, toward the end of the day. We were able to confirm electricity was back by communicating with the Quartz lightbulb, which is hooked up to the internet over WiFi with a Belkin WeMo Switch. The lightbulb was on, and we were back in business.

The heat isn’t quite working here at the office yet, but it’s nice to be back together again, having weathered the storm. By the way, we ended October, our first full month operation, with 840,343 unique visitors, a figure that blew away our expectations.

Before he won a Nobel Prize, his teacher told him pursuing...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:01:09 -0400

Before he won a Nobel Prize, his teacher told him pursuing science “would be a sheer waste of time”

Here’s a complete snapshot of the US jobs report in charts and...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 10:34:14 -0400

Here’s a complete snapshot of the US jobs report in charts and stats

A role reversal: Mexicans are finally showing signs of consumer...

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:58:05 -0400

A role reversal: Mexicans are finally showing signs of consumer confidence while Brazilians betray some doubt.

Missing the magic in Apple product announcements? Nine Apple...

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 14:21:38 -0400

Missing the magic in Apple product announcements? Nine Apple patents show what could be ahead

Hello, world.

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 19:30:37 -0400

Hello, world.:

Oh right, we launched today! We’ll start using this Tumblr a lot more once we catch our breath. In the meantime, enjoy the site, and please send any feedback to hi@qz.com.

Why Quartz is ditching beats in favor of obsessions

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 15:39:23 -0400

Why Quartz is ditching beats in favor of obsessions:

On his blog, Gideon explains how we are organizing our newsroom:

So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena—the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in. “Financial markets” is a beat, but “the financial crisis” is a phenomenon. “The environment” is a beat, but “climate change” is a phenomenon. “Energy” is a beat, but “the global surge of energy abundance” is a phenomenon. “China” is a beat, but “Chinese investment in Africa” is a phenomenon. We call these phenomena our “obsessions”. These are the kinds of topics Quartz will put in its navigation bar, and as the world changes, so will they.

Read the rest on Gideon’s blog.

Quartz style: no pulling punches

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:33:33 -0400

Gideon, our global news editor, has been working on a draft of the Quartz style guide: an early attempt to define our voice and sensibility. We’ll probably publish the guide at some point, but for now, it should suffice to say that George Orwell is frequently cited. The document is more advisory than prescriptive, but I love this astringent passage from Gideon’s section on slang:

Stay away from curveballs, hardballs, inside baseballs, and ballparks; deep benches, end runs, slam-dunks, Hail Mary passes, and full-court presses; sucker and one-two punches, switch and pinch hitters, point men and wingmen; stepping up to the plate, going to the mat, throwing in the towel, coming out of leftfield, or coming in under the wire; and covering one’s bases, getting to first or second base, or being off-base.

Game, set, and match. (However, a portion of our newsroom is lobbying to exempt cricket metaphors from this rule, so you may well see financiers hitting for six in Quartz prose.)

On a related note, Kevin recently brought into the office a copy of Le Monde’s style guide from 2002, when he was a reporter in Paris. I was amused to find a mini-glossaire under the entry for “Internet,” including a number of faddish, English-language terms of that era like “shopbot” and “shareware.”

—Zach Seward

You can light up the Quartz newsroom

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 09:04:00 -0400

Here at Quartz, our newsroom will be driven by a set of core obsessions. (Kevin talked about this strategy in a recent interview, and we’ll have plenty more to say about it as we approach our launch.) One of my obsessions is the Internet of Things, which refers to physical objects that can collect data and communicate, like plants that tweet when they’re thirsty or trash cans that report the news.

To slake my obsession and distract myself from work, I recently set up a lightbulb in our office that toggles on and off when someone mentions @quartznews on Twitter, among other rules. Now, when you interact with us, our newsroom is literally brightened.

The setup is fairly simple, thanks to some new products that help anyone with a nerdy curiosity play around with the Internet of Things. The lightbulb, pictured above, is plugged into a Belkin WeMo Switch, which was released last month. It connects to the Internet over WiFi, and an accompanying iPhone app lets you turn on and off any device plugged into the WeMo. (I use one at home to flip on my AC before getting home.)

In addition to manual control with your phone, it’s also possible to give the switch a bit of a Web-connected brain. Belkin has partnered with ifttt, a Web service that stands for “if this, then that.” That allowed us to set some rules for our little lightbulb: if something happens, then flip the switch. Here’s what we came up with:

Facebook’s share price dipped below $20 on Thursday and Friday last week. And China has won 77 medals so far at the Olympics. (The latter data comes from an API built by ESPN, which is nice because we’re pro-collaboration here at Quartz.) But the most interesting and meaningful, if not exactly practical, trigger is the one that lights up our newsroom when @quartznews is mentioned on Twitter. It’s a nice manifestation of our relationship with Quartz users, without whom we’ll be in the dark.

Of course, there are plenty of other lights in our newsroom, we actually use TweetDeck to keep tabs of mentions, and having multiple triggers means it’s sometimes unclear whether Facebook is tanking or we’re blowing up on Twitter. We should probably pare it down to a single rule. But for now, we’re just playing around. When devices and sensors are hooked up to the Web, the possibilities unfurl in lots of directions.

The lightbulb awaits your tweets…

—Zach Seward (photo at top by Jackie Snow)

There was something nice about the scrap of paper with...

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:15:24 -0400

There was something nice about the scrap of paper with “QUARTZ” on it that had been hanging on our front door since May, but we figured it was time to get a real sign. So there we are, along with our neighbors The Atlantic Wire.

We’ve been quiet here on Tumblr while we focus on building...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:47:33 -0400

Rearranging desks as new staff arrives

Quartz welcome: coffee, Advil, Moleskine

Our makeshift living room

Theresa working on the login system

Our table is also a whiteboard :)

We’ve been quiet here on Tumblr while we focus on building the first version of Quartz, but we wanted to share some photos from the past month. Our office in Soho grew significantly with the addition of new staff in June and July. Plenty more will be arriving in August. You can follow our growing team on Twitter, and here is some recent press coverage we’ve received. In the meantime, if you’re curious about what we’re building or would like to collaborate, please get in touch. We’d love to have you by the office.

Welcome, Gideon

Tue, 29 May 2012 18:04:32 -0400

Earlier today we announced that Gideon Lichfield is joining Quartz as our global news editor, and we couldn’t be more excited.

As we began sharing our vision for Quartz this winter, several people volunteered that Gideon would be the perfect person to work on this project. He is a deep thinker on digital media who speaks five languages fluently and has reported everywhere from Moscow to Mexico City — in other words, exactly what we were looking for.

Gideon comes to us from The Economist, where he has worked in various capacities since 1996. He is currently serving as the magazine’s media editor, and previous responsibilities have ranged from documentary film to e-learning to The Economist’s website, as well as three bureau chief postings.

Gideon shares our conviction that there’s a huge opportunity in providing quality coverage of the new global economy from a newsroom solely focused on digital platforms. We’re eager for him to now join us in creating it and look forward to his leadership.

You can follow the growing Quartz team on this Twitter list.

—Kevin J. Delaney, editor in chief