Welcome to Quartz.
Over the past few months, we’ve assembled a team of digital journalists and developers to create a new kind of business news offering that is global, digitally native, and designed for the mobile and tablet devices that increasingly dominate our lives. This is version 1.0 of our efforts.
Quartz is emerging in the wake of a financial crisis that exposed a fundamentally changed economic order with new leaders and ways of doing business. In today’s global economy, the most significant developments are found far from the traditional centers of gravity, and traditional ways of understanding the world no longer apply. Aware of this, we intend to do some things differently than you might expect.
Our coverage is rooted in a set of defining obsessions: 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. These are the issues that energize our newsroom, and we invite you to obsess about them along with us.
You can read our opening analyses of some of these tectonic questions on Quartz today, including Steve LeVine’s assessment of the impacts the new energy boom will have on the global balance of power and Christopher Mims’ look at the land grab underway to reach the next one billion internet users via the mobile web. Complete coverage of our core obsessions is accessible from the navigation bar at the top of the site.
We’ll publish stories on these obsessions and other news in a range of forms and sizes: short link posts that point you to valuable sources across the web; visual pieces that tell you a story better than prose could; longform articles that offer you a breadth of understanding. Our founding team includes veterans of some of the world’s highest-quality news organizations. Collectively, we have reported from 115 countries and speak 19 languages (and 19 programming languages, too).
Quartz is designed for mobility and efficiency, starting with our concise domain name qz.com. When you visit the homepage, our top story is open by default, and you can just start reading. Or, if you prefer, select from the queue of headlines to the left — top stories, by default, but you can select our latest and most-popular stories, as well.
If you’re reading this on a laptop or desktop computer, I encourage you to visit qz.com from the browser on an iPhone or tablet. There is no app to download. Quartz works well on touchscreens and adapts to your screen size, so it’s easily readable on mobile devices.
Quartz is totally free, with no paywall to get in your way. We’re ad-supported, thanks to our four launch sponsors.
We’ll be updating Quartz on a continual basis, allowing you to catch up with news on the go. We’re also emailing a daily morning briefing on global business news, formatted for easy reading on your smartphone and tailored for your time zone, since it’s always morning somewhere. You can sign up here.
We view the creation of Quartz as just the beginning of an ongoing process, and we hope it will be a collaborative one. Quartz readers, collectively, know more about this new global economy than we do, so we hope you will be in touch with tips, suggestions, and submissions. You can always reach our newsroom directly by emailing hi@qz.com, and you can also connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, Sina Weibo, App.net, and Flipboard.
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. What is the best way to build a global news organization in 2012? With your help, we’ll figure it out.
Thank you for visiting us. And keep coming back to qz.com.
Best,
Kevin J. Delaney
Editor in chief
@delaney