Quartz executive editor Zach Seward spoke with Rick Edmunds of The Poynter Institute about the business news site’s success that led to it being sold to a Japanese company on Monday for as much as $110 million.
Edmunds wrote, “Executive editor Zach Seward spoke with me Monday afternoon about how the publication grew and prospered, beginning with that good idea.
“‘The one-sentence summary is that we are a guide to the new global economy,’ Seward said. ‘So we are focused on explanation’ — not so much investigations or event-driven news breaks.
“‘Also, we have a bias against the status quo,’ he said. ‘Not everything is interesting — even some whole industries.’
“Content is organized around themes, ‘obsessions’ in Quartz parlance, with topics like media, tech and an assortment of others getting attention, but not in a traditional beats and lines-of-business way.
“An early obsession, maybe the first, Seward said, was ‘the next billion’ — people coming online for the first time, that is.
“‘That’s multi-disciplinary… a tech story but also a finance story and a health care story,’ he said.”
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