Categories: OLD Media Moves

How Quartz started the email newsletter revolution

JR Raphael of Fast Company writes about email newsletters revolutionizing publishing and focuses on business news site Quartz.

Raphael writes, “Just across the internet, the business publication Quartz is widely credited with helping to ‘reinvent’ the email newsletter, moving beyond mere collections of links to provide a distinct voice, format, and style crafted specifically for that medium. Quartz, however, operates on a much grander scale than Revue’s typical customer — with five different newsletters now reaching a total of over 750,000 subscribers — and it relies on its own custom-built software for content creation.

“Still, the underlying principles remain the same, and it’s easy to see the link between what Quartz is accomplishing on its own platform and what Revue is trying to democratize with its online offering. Both scenarios, in fact, seem to share a common ancestor: the print magazine.

“Just ask Jessanne Collins, the editor of Quartz’s relatively new Obsession email newsletter. Collins relies heavily on her experience in the print world — where she recently served as editor in chief of Mental Floss, prior to its online-only transition — to bring a sense of purpose and cohesiveness to every issue she creates.

“‘To me, there’s a similarity to magazine-making with that, where you’re really thinking about the thing as a whole and how it stands,’ she says.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.