Quartz to allow readers to contribute to articles

Quartz, the financial news site from The Atlantic, has launched a new service that allows readers to contribute to articles on the site.

Readers can now annotate Quartz stories on the level of individual paragraphs, in a new spin on commenting that is intended to encourage thoughtful contributions and feature them prominently alongside the original content.

“Our aim with Quartz from the start has been to rethink any conventions of websites that didn’t serve the readers,” said editor in chief Kevin Delaney in a statement. “We felt strongly that reader comments were traditionally too often hidden, and unanchored from the original content they were about. With annotations, we’re allowing Quartz readers to comment right next to specific points in articles and share those views with their colleagues and friends.”

Some of the earliest newspapers had wide margins for readers to jot down their notes next to articles. And the web’s technical architects initially planned to include similar annotation functionality across all of the Internet.

Quartz reporters and editors are themselves actively participating in the discussions, and will feature annotations that are particularly insightful. Readers can respond to each other, and easily share any annotations via social networks and email.

A video showcasing how annotations works can be found here. Quartz’s team has written about the feature here.