Quartz editor in chief Kevin Delaney sent out the following announcement on Monday:
Hello Quartz –
I wanted to share with you a few coming changes to how our product, technology, and editorial teams are managed. We’re making these changes as a result of our accelerated growth of the past few years and in anticipation of the growth to come. Put simply, the structure that served us well as a 25-person organization in Soho needs a bit of reworking as we approach 200 staff in offices around the world.
One key change is for Zach Seward to assume full responsibility for product and technology. We took a big step toward this late last year, with Zach taking on responsibility for cross-organization projects touching our product. Now we’re codifying that in organization structure, with Zach formally overseeing the product and product-engineering teams. The iPhone app, Quartz as an API, and Things are among his special contributions, to name a few of the many that stretch back to before the launch of Quartz. Zach will be senior vice president for product and executive editor, those titles reflecting how he’s led our product and editorial strategies. Anyone who knows Zach can appreciate his unique ability to span those areas.
We’ve always believed that technology and design are critical, core focuses for Quartz to succeed. I’m announcing today two promotions reflecting that conviction.
Micah Ernst, our product engineering director, is now vice president of product engineering. Micah has for over two years impressively led the development team, pulling off a string of launches that other media companies envy, from multiple upgrades to the site, special projects and editions, to Atlas and Apple News integration. Micah has amazingly high standards for the engineering and operations of our site, and I’m constantly grateful for his leadership of an extremely talented team. We are continuing to expand that team, with additional developers to work on our site, Atlas, and other projects—and Micah’s management and technical vision become even more critical.
Daniel Lee will now be design director of Quartz, reporting to Zach. Daniel’s product design is behind so much of what people like about Quartz. His vision has led us beyond the original site with a queue of headlines on the side to the unique homepage and expansive article pages that we have today. And his instinct about the potential for a chat interface and the resulting design has driven the success of our app. Daniel is as collegial as he is talented as a designer, and this promotion reflects our confidence in his design direction for Quartz going forward.
On the editorial side, Heather Landy is now managing editor of Quartz. This promotion formalizes the job she’s been doing already, managing the bulk of our journalists including the excellent corps of editors leading the reporting pods. As global news editor, Heather has been overseeing the daily activity of our newsroom, bringing deep business editing knowledge, a remarkable work ethic, and infectious enthusiasm for creative and noteworthy journalism. She has a talent for tackling the ambition at the core of Quartz’s mission: to produce smart journalism that has an impact via a large, global readership. With this promotion, Heather also takes formal responsibility for all of our international efforts, with our editorial teams in India, Africa, Asia, and Europe reporting in to her.
Xana Antunes will now be executive editor. Xana has had remarkable success in leading new initiatives since joining Quartz in 2014. Video has been a highlight, as Quartz’s team of video journalists is the envy of our industry and their work a new current of creativity. Xana has also edited some of our most ambitious features—several of which have won journalism awards–and led our recruiting efforts for much of the past year. She’s in the process of establishing our Talent Lab, a project to rethink how we find and deploy super-talented journalists and better support the development of newsroom staff. As co-executive editor with Zach, Xana will continue to oversee these efforts and add oversight of the Ideas team. Our thesis is that Ideas and Talent have a shared mission in finding the most brilliant voices of our time and bringing them to Quartz—and so it makes sense to bring them together in our organization.
Starting in August, senior editor Gideon Lichfield will move to London and lead our journalistic activities in Europe. This is a six-month assignment for Gideon, a welcome confluence of the personal and professional, and our goal is to bring focus to expanding the editorial team in Europe and structuring it for the next phase of growth while he is there. Gideon will work closely on coverage with the European editorial staff and international teams, including Quartz Africa during their morning. Quartz’s founding global news editor, Gideon has of late been leading our feature-writing activities, editing several award-winning pieces. We will shortly begin tryouts for the important role of NYC Friday cocktails czar while he’s away.
The goal of all of these moves is to better communicate the leadership roles being played by our colleagues, and help strengthen the organization as we keep growing. Thanks for your support for each other through these changes and for your help making Quartz better.
