'Digitally native' business news site Quartz launches

The Atlantic Media Company announced the launch of Quartz this week, its new digital business news site.

Described by Nieman Journalism Lab as "a technological and structural innovator", the HTML5 web app is optimised for mobile phones and tablets.

As the site says in its welcome post, it is "digitally native" and "focused on the touchscreen and mobile devices that increasingly dominate our lives", with its design starting "with the iPad foremost in mind".

"We modified it from there to suit smartphones and, finally, personal computers. Your experience with Quartz should befit the hardware you visit us with and shift as seamlessly as you do from phone to tablet to laptop and back again.

"Call us a website or, if you like, a web app: Quartz combines the benefits of the free and open web with the elegance of an application."

In a release editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney added that this week's launch "is the beginning of an ongoing process of innovation around the best ways to report and deliver information to Quartz readers worldwide."

The site is free to access and European editor Stephanie Gruner Buckley told Journalism.co.uk that keeping Quartz free and open is "really important to us".

"We want the information to be accessible to anyone, we don't want paywalls, we want people to be able to share that information, link to that information, comment on it without having to download something."

The site interface runs on a series of "core obsessions", topic headings such as mobile web, technology, "Euro Crunch" and the US election. The presentation of the content is designed to be "clean", says Gruner Buckley.

Users can also search stories by "top" articles, or most "popular", and they can click on a "latest" tab to see the most recent news updates from across the web.

The welcome post highlights the integration of Quartz's development and editorial teams: "Developers and journalists, sometimes one-and-the-same, sit next to each other in the Quartz newsroom as we continually iterate and experiment. We know that the future of news will be written in code."

According to the release the teams collectively know 19 programming languages, and Gruner Buckley also discussed how they are working closely together.

"We keep a running tab that everyone can access on Google documents that any kind of issues that come up we can put them there quickly, the development team can see them they can quickly fix them ... it's all so immediate".

And Quartz is also using the newly launched Spundge platform to organise its workflows.

In its online welcome post the site sums up that it is "embracing the opportunity to create a newsroom that is wholly focused on digital storytelling".

"We view the creation of Quartz as just the beginning of an ongoing process in discovering the best ways to report and deliver information online."

The site is running on an advertising model, supported by four launch sponsors. It says that from next year it "will be accepting advertising from other clients".

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