Following business news these days often feels like wading into a rushing river, each incremental development indistinguishable from the next, with no chance to find your footing. “It’s impossible to tell what’s important and what will no longer matter in the morning,” one reader told us of her experience trying to keep up.
We like to think of Quartz as an eddy in that river of news, a spot of relative calm where you’ll find only the most important and interesting stuff. Our morning email, the Quartz Daily Brief, helps make sense of the latest business news. Our obsessions keep you, and us, focused on the most critical shifts in the global economy. And today we’re taking the next logical step with a new feature that extracts the most essential knowledge from our news coverage.
The new feature is called Quartz Essentials, naturally, and you’ll find them at the end of many articles and other parts of our website and app. Check out, for instance, this recent piece about the challenges online grocers are facing in India. Following the article are essentials that help you place that particular news within the broader context of India’s coronavirus crisis. Then you can zoom out further with the essentials on the pandemic-fueled ascendance of e-commerce. In each of these collections, you’ll find a quick, engaging précis on the topic that will keep you tapping through.
We’ve also placed Quartz Essentials at the heart of our biggest editorial endeavors, like our obsessions (see How We Spend, for instance) and our weekly field guides for members (such as this week’s on the future of the IPO). The idea is to help get you oriented before diving deeper into our articles—after all, the most important things to know about any topic are rarely just the most recent developments. Essentials are free to read, by the way, so they’re also a great way to get to know Quartz and then consider becoming a member for the full experience.
Quartz Essentials was made possible by the generous support of our members along with launch partners in the US and UK. You’ll begin to see essentials from several of those great brands, clearly labeled as such, in the coming weeks. The team at Quartz Creative is skilled at distilling complex stories into compelling formats for our partners, and we’ve made it easy for our partners to create essentials in a few minutes, just like our own newsroom.
We hope Quartz Essentials will make reading the rest of Quartz—and other sources, too—more valuable and ensure you’re amassing plenty of stock amid the flow of news. We’ve been testing essentials with small groups and A/B tests of millions of readers since the beginning of the year, and invite your feedback at hi@qz.com. Thanks!