Quartz finally burns out

A decade ago, I was fielding concerned questions from editors at the FT about the rise of Quartz, an upstart financial news site. Times have changed. I haven't written about it in five years, reflecting its slow retreat from mainstream attention, as it was passed from owner to owner. The shattered shell of the publication has been sold, with all but two members of staff gone. Whatever remains is Quartz in name only.

In some ways, this is heart-breaking. At its peak, it was doing innovative stuff. Its Daily Briefing email was one of the pioneers that helped kickstart the editorial newsletter resurgence we’ve seen over the past decade. The (also now defunct) Folio Mag wrote about this back in 2016:

"We thought that an email product shouldn’t just be headlines to drive you back to the website," Lauf says. "Rather, we asked, 'What would we want from an email product? How could an email we receive every morning make us smarter?'"

That seems like obvious wisdom today, but was revolutionary in an era when most editorial newsletters were just vomits of everything published that day/week/month. But even that newsletter is a shell of what it once was.

Memorialising Quartz

Quartz co-founder Zach Seward has blogged an obituary for the title he owned for a while:

But Quartz never made money. We grew, between 2012 and 2018, to nearly 250 employees and $35 million in annual revenue. The dismal economics of digital media meant losing more than $40 million over that stretch just to grow unsustainably large.

This is a variation on the tale of so many 2010s pure-play digital innovators: they want for scale, and never managed to find the revenue to support that scale. The economics of start-up apps just don’t work for start-up media. The less is, clearly, that innovation needs to be supported by a sustainable business model.

I hope, as we look back at the 2010s, Quartz will be remembered for its innovations others built on, not for its imprudent expansion. Seward again:

I think, in all those respects, we succeeded. Nothing about what ultimately transpired makes me regret the choices we made or the fun that we had. Quartz produced a lot of great journalism, served our readers well, and widely influenced the rest of our industry. If that's all Quartz was in the end, I'll take it.