Quartz

About Quartz

Quartz is a digital business news publication based in New York City, covering the global economy, technology, work and culture. Founded in 2012 by Atlantic Media as a digitally native news outlet for business people in the new global economy, it has since passed through a series of owners — a Japanese media company, its own management, G/O Media and, most recently, the Canadian software company Redbrick. Its website is qz.com, where it publishes news, analysis and a suite of newsletters for a worldwide audience.

A Digitally Native Launch

Quartz launched its website on September 24, 2012, designed from the start to deliver content primarily to mobile and tablet users. At a time when most legacy news organizations were still retrofitting print workflows for the web, Quartz was conceived as an internet-first publication, with a clean design, chart-driven storytelling and a global sensibility baked into its DNA.

The launch was one of the most closely watched media debuts of its era. Atlantic Media, the owner of The Atlantic, was betting that a new generation of business readers — younger, more international, more comfortable on phones than on paper — wanted a different kind of business journalism: concise, visually inventive and free of the insider jargon of the financial press.

The Founding Team

The publication was initially led by Kevin Delaney, a former managing director of WSJ.com, Zach Seward, a former Wall Street Journal social media editor, and Gideon Lichfield, a global news editor from The Economist, among other editors. The founding team was drawn from news organizations including Bloomberg, The Economist, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, giving the startup instant credibility in both business and general-interest journalism.

Seward in particular would become synonymous with the publication, remaining with it through every subsequent ownership change and eventually leading the management buyout that took the company private in 2020. His trajectory from founding editor to CEO mirrored the publication's own evolution from experiment to institution.

Global Ambitions

With its main office in New York, Quartz built a network of correspondents and staff reporters based in Hong Kong, India, London, Los Angeles, Thailand, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. According to its website at the time, the Quartz team reported in 115 countries and spoke 19 languages, an unusually international footprint for a young American publication.

The expansion came quickly. A year after expanding into India and launching Quartz India in 2014, the company launched the Africa-focused Quartz Africa in 2015, along with the chart-building platform Atlas. It also launched publications specifically for Hong Kong, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, signaling an ambition to be a genuinely global business publication rather than an American one with foreign bureaus.

Newsletters and the Paywall Years

Quartz invested early in email newsletters, building a roster that at its peak drew some 700,000 subscribers, led by its flagship Daily Brief. The newsletter operation became one of the company's signature products and, years later, one of its most valuable assets in the eyes of acquirers.

From 2019 to 2022, Quartz operated behind a paywall, part of a broader industry pivot toward reader revenue. The subscription push came as advertising revenue softened — revenue declined to $27.6 million as ad spending fell — and the company sought a more durable business model. The paywall era coincided with some of the most turbulent ownership years in the publication's history.

The Uzabase Acquisition

In July 2018, the Japanese financial data and media company Uzabase acquired Quartz from Atlantic Media for $86 million. Uzabase said it was drawn by Quartz's global reach, continued growth, bold and creative reporting and mobile-friendly platform, and the deal valued the publication at between $75 million and $110 million by some estimates.

The acquisition was meant to give Quartz the resources to keep growing internationally while giving Uzabase a foothold in English-language business media. For a time the arrangement held, but the economics of digital media proved unforgiving: the company reported a loss of $18.4 million on revenue of $26.4 million in 2019 and cut about 80 staff positions in 2020.

Unionization

In April 2019, the editorial staff of Quartz announced that an overwhelming majority of eligible staff had signed on to join the NewsGuild of New York. The union drive, announced on April 15, 2019, was part of a wave of organizing across digital media, and the staff cited pay equity, diversity and job security among their goals.

The union's mission statement spoke of strengthening existing benefits and securing a seat at the table in discussions about the publication's future. At the time, the site employed more than 230 people across five continents, and the organizing effort reflected both affection for the publication and anxiety about its direction under distant corporate ownership.

Removal from China's App Store

In October 2019, shortly after Seward became CEO following co-CEO and editor-in-chief Delaney's resignation, Quartz had its app removed by Apple from the Chinese App Store as part of the Great Firewall, for its reporting on the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests. The episode underscored the risks of the publication's global ambitions: the same international coverage that defined its journalism could run afoul of state censorship.

The removal was widely covered in the Western press as an example of how American tech platforms accommodate Chinese government demands. For Quartz, it was a badge of editorial independence, evidence that its reporting on Hong Kong had registered with the authorities in Beijing.

The Management Buyout

In 2020, Quartz went private, with co-founder and CEO Zach Seward buying the business news site from Uzabase in a management buyout that also saw editor-in-chief Katherine Bell and the rest of the Quartz staff take equity in the new company. Seward described the move as making the company "better off right now as a startup, freer to chart our own path," and said it would look to raise outside funding.

The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news that Uzabase wanted to sell, reported that Uzabase CEO Yusuke Umeda had made a personal loan to support the site. The buyout was a rare example of a digital media property returning to independence — and to employee ownership — after a corporate acquisition had soured.

The G/O Media Era

In May 2022, G/O Media acquired Quartz for less than $10 million, a fraction of the $86 million Uzabase had paid four years earlier. Seward joined G/O Media as general manager and editor-in-chief of Quartz, while Katherine Bell, who had been editor-in-chief since January 2020, continued as an advisor. G/O Media's CEO Jim Spanfeller praised Quartz's mission-driven journalism and said the digital business news space was ripe for investment.

Under G/O Media, Quartz posted its highest traffic since the acquisition. In the first quarter of 2024, traffic was up 212 percent from the same period the prior year and 311 percent higher than the fourth quarter of 2023, with editor-in-chief Dan Hirschhorn crediting a strategic editorial transformation and a growing team. The site won two of SABEW's Best in Business Awards around the time of the acquisition, adding to a shelf of journalism honors collected since 2012.

Sale to Redbrick

In 2025, G/O Media sold Quartz to Redbrick, a Canadian software company, in what was reported as the fourth sale of the publication since 2018. Redbrick said Quartz would be integrated with Paved, the newsletter advertising platform it had recently acquired, to connect the publication with premium advertisers and better monetize its newsletter subscriber base of more than one million opt-in members.

Quartz editor-in-chief Dan Hirschhorn called the deal a new chapter, noting that for over a decade Quartz had covered the biggest stories essential to the business leaders of today and tomorrow. The sale continued G/O Media's selloff of its portfolio, which had previously included Lifehacker, Jezebel, Deadspin and Gizmodo, leaving The Root and Kotaku among its remaining brands.

Editorial Identity and Recognition

Throughout its ownership changes, Quartz has been widely praised for its innovative journalism, product design and advertising, winning many of journalism's highest honors since its 2012 launch. Its signature approaches — the obsessive use of charts, the Daily Brief newsletter format, coverage of the "new global economy" spanning tech, geopolitics, work and culture — have been widely imitated across digital media.

The publication's history reads as a compressed chronicle of the digital media business itself: a celebrated launch, rapid global expansion, a corporate acquisition, a painful restructuring, a return to independence, a bargain sale and a technology-company rescue. Through it all, Quartz has kept publishing, and its survival across four owners in seven years may be its most distinctive achievement.