Quartz editor: We want smart stories that people share

Brittaney Kiefer of PRWeek interviewed Quartz senior editor Zach Seward about the financial news website’s redesigns and other aspects of its operation.

Here is an excerpt:

Since Quartz launched two years ago, it has been redesigned twice. What was the difference between each one?
The launch design focused on mobile phones and tablets, being cognizant of where most growth was happening and where readers were increasingly getting news.

In our first redesign, we tweaked things to double down on making our content shine above all else. Our strategy is to write smart stories that people want to share, so the most important thing we can do is make the pieces look as good as possible and stay out of the reader’s way.

In our second redesign in August, we made the mobile experience better and cleaner. We also added a homepage. Previously, we just dropped you into our top story. That worked because we wanted to focus on getting traffic to stories through social without being overly concerned about what a homepage would look like.

Homepages are not as popular as before. However, we thought we could give people a better experience when they came to us directly. We expect growth will continue to come from individual stories shared on social media, but it is still key to serve our loyal readers.

Read more here.