What Was Quartz?

Summary

"It's impossible to kill a media brand," Jim Spanfeller told me on my first day working for him, as we sat in his corner office. He had just bought the business news organization, Quartz, that I had spent the past decade building and, most recently, trying desperately to save from oblivion. So I was inclined to believe him.But I knew it wasn't true. Jim and his private-equity-backed digital-media conglomerate G/O Media had already destroyed several of their properties, some all at once (Deadspin), most of the others by sapping resources, antagonizing their staff, and undermining the editorial visions that once made them great (Jezebel, The Root). It would take him three years to do the same to Quartz.The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list. I thought back to Jim's comment. His cynical view of digital media was good neither for journalism nor business, but maybe Jim was right about that one thing. What is Quartz now if not a "media brand" that refuses to die? § We launched Quartz in 2012 with prestigious editorial hires, a slick new website, bold pronouncements about the future of media, and a splashy profile in The New York Times in which we likened ourselves to a "pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy." It sure felt that way. From a spare SoHo loft, and then increasingly fancier offices, we set out to be compelling, entertaining, serious, and excellent all at the same time. Everything was up for reinvention, from the structure of our stories to the design of our ads to the need for a traditional homepage. We believed that a news organization should stand for something, which in our case was globalism. Most of all, we put a strong emphasis on quality at a time when online journalism was still considered inferior to print publications that happened to have websites.I think, in all those respects, we succeeded. Nothing about what ultimately transp...