Quartz expanded the boundaries of mobile storytelling with sleek design, an innovative chat app and journalism that went deep into the under-explored business stories all around us.
The past 12 months have been packed with new initiatives at Quartz. We made our very first stories in video form in mid-2015, and since then we have put up some 360 videos that have collectively been watched over 300 million times on Facebook.
On May 31, 2015 we followed up on the success of our Quartz India sub-site by launching Quartz Africa, with its own team of writers to cover the continent. In December, we radically redesigned our homepage to an unconventional format that ditches the overcrowding of traditional home pages for a spare, clean design with a short and highly curated selection of our best work in various formats. Our biweekly podcast, “Actuality,” which launched in June 2015, has attained over a million episode downloads in the year since then.
And in June 2015, we launched a new charting platform, Atlas, that allows anyone to embed or download the thousands of charts our journalists create each year and see the data behind them. And in May of this year, we started opening Atlas to the public so that anybody can create charts on it; our ambition is to make it a global repository of charts and data with its own community of chart creators.
While doing all that, in the past 12 months we have grown our editorial team to more than 75 journalists and our audience to more than 16 million monthly uniques. The more than 50 stories we produce each day increasingly include long, deeply reported pieces, such as Steve LeVine’s 4,600-word profile of an American company that has revolutionized the manufacturing process for the all-important lithium-ion battery. But we’ve also kept exploring ways to break free of the written word. David Yanofsky’s simple stock-trading game showed, more clearly and eloquently than any article, how foolish it is to think you can beat the market. Adam Freelander and Gwynn Guilford’s video analyzed China’s stock market collapse using arresting comparisons to the US and Japan.
In the past year more than ever, we believe Quartz has set the standard for what it means to be a digitally native publication, committed to experiment and innovation in the pursuit of serious journalism.
