Quartz rethinks the newsroom for the digital age

Lucia Moses of Digiday writes about the uniqueness of the Quartz newsroom.

Moses writes, “A lamp is rigged up to let staffers know when it’s going to rain (it was green on Tuesday, indicating it was safe to go out). Lights go on when the coffee is ready or the dishwasher is done. Sam Williams, the developer behind these gimmicks, is working with beacon technology to program employees’ phones so a customized tune will play when they walk in the door.

“Whimsy aside, these features speak directly to founding editor Kevin Delaney’s vision of how a digital newsroom should be staffed. As established news organizations try to retrofit themselves with technology and also get digitally fluent staffers to achieve scale, Quartz had the advantage of being able to start from scratch, free of legacy issues. In its first year, its U.S. traffic reached 2 million uniques, putting it in the range of stalwarts like The Economist and The Financial Times; it’s now 3.9 million uniques, according to comScore.

“At other news organizations, product reports to the business side, but at Quartz, Delaney and his co-founders created a development team that reports to him. Developers and reporters not only work side by side — in some cases, they’re the same person.

“‘The conviction I brought to Quartz was, we were most successful when editors and developers work together, and I wanted as much as possible to make that an everyday, unmediated thing,’ said Delaney, who also serves as co-president. ‘My goal as one of the leaders of Quartz is that unmediated collaboration, brainstorming, is one of the ingredients for success going forward.'”

Read more here.