Quartz officially launches at noon

Here is part of editor in chief Kevin Delaney’s welcome letter to readers:

Quartz is emerging in the wake of a financial crisis that exposed a fundamentally changed economic order with new leaders and ways of doing business. In today’s global economy, the most significant developments are found far from the traditional centers of gravity, and traditional ways of understanding the world no longer apply. Aware of this, we intend to do some things differently than you might expect.

Our coverage is rooted in a set of defining obsessions: core topics and knotty questions of seismic importance to business professionals, from the rise of digital payment systems to life in a world of extremely low interest rates to the growth and habits of the consumer class. These are the issues that energize our newsroom, and we invite you to obsess about them along with us.

You can read our opening analyses of some of these tectonic questions on Quartz today, including Steve LeVine’s assessment of the impacts the new energy boom will have on the global balance of power and Christopher Mims’ look at the land grab underway to reach the next one billion internet users via the mobile web. Complete coverage of our core obsessions is accessible from the navigation bar at the top of the site.

We’ll publish stories on these obsessions and other news in a range of forms and sizes: short link posts that point you to valuable sources across the web; visual pieces that tell you a story better than prose could; longform articles that offer you a breadth of understanding. Our founding team includes veterans of some of the world’s highest-quality news organizations. Collectively, we have reported from 115 countries and speak 19 languages (and 19 programming languages, too).

Read the rest of it here.