How Quartz is rethinking its membership offerings

Christine Schmidt of Nieman Lab writes about how financial news site Quartz is rethinking its membership offerings.

Schmidt writes, “It’s also being a bit more aggressive on pricing, offering a 40-percent-off coupon that lowers a new subscriber’s first-year price to $60.

“Quartz announced a key hire this morning, bringing Walt Frick (a former Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow here) aboard as membership editor, coming over from Harvard Business Review.

“In the meantime, Quartz is also working on strengthening the journalism as well as broadening the perks. It recently launched its first-ever investigations team, which isn’t usually a short-term, small expense. John Keefe will lead the four-person reporting team digging into online advertising and political influence ahead of the U.S. presidential election, leaning on the grant-funded Quartz AI Studio to infuse more machine learning-powered reporting into the investigations. Seward said it wasn’t a hard choice as an investment:

“‘As we focus on membership and our relationship to members, a number one thing that members and potential members want from Quartz is our journalism. So it becomes a pretty easy calculus.”

Read more here.