Quartz stories: Smart but approachable

Financial news site Quartz aims for content that is smart but approachable, said its managing editor on Wednesday.

“That’s a really powerful way to tell a story,” said Heather Landy in a conversation in Quartz’s new offices in New York.

She gave two examples of such content.

The first was a story from May about changes to the Food and Drug Administration’s Nutrition Facts label that appears on nearly 800,000 food products. It was written by Anne Quito, who writes about design for Quartz and titled, “With an updated Nutrition Facts label, the FDA settles an eternal question: ‘Why Helvetica?'”

The new label was covered by media around the world from a health and policy perspective, noted Landy. But Quito was the only journalist who focused on the design aspects of the label, such as the typeface and why certain items were bolded.

Landy said there’s a limited audience for design stories. “But if you take a topic that matters to everyone like food, or politics, and write about it from a design perspective, that universe is huge,” said Landy, noting that Quartz seeks journalists who can take a topic everyone is talking about and explain it through their own lens.

The second example was a story from last September written by Quartz’s former tech editor Dan Frommer, now editor in chief of Recode. It was titled “Why are we still calling them phones?”

The story was two paragraphs and a chart, and it took Frommer about 10 minutes to put it together.

“In any other newsroom, we would have sat around and said, ‘We should do this 4,000-word deep dive and what this means for Verizon,'” said Landy. “But if we want to connect with readers, it’s with this chart and story.”

The story got “above-average” traffic for Quartz, and Landy called it “a great return on investment.”