Quartz introduce chart search engine Atlas

Business news site Quartz introduced Tuesday a new section of its site, a search engine for the thousands of bar and line charts that Quartz journalists have made since its introduction in 2012, reports Dino Grandoni of the New York Times.

Grandoni writes, “Usually, the publications that take advantage of their archives are older and have more content to draw upon. But Quartz is exploiting the resiliency of charts in a social media environment where news moves swiftly.

“‘Writing ages pretty quickly,’ said Jeremy J. Littau, a journalism professor at Lehigh University. ‘One of the nice things about charts is that they have a little bit more staying power.’

“Quartz, itself a spinoff of the company that publishes The Atlantic magazine, has tried featuring niche areas of coverage. For four months last year, Quartz broke out its coverage of the television business into its own website, called Glass, before shutting it down ‘in order to put our focus elsewhere,’ said Zachary M. Seward, vice president for product and executive editor at Quartz.”

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