Quartz to launch iPhone app, expand email offerings

Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Quartz publisher Jay Lauf about the business news site’s plans for 2016.

Here is an excerpt:

Lichterman: One of the other things mentioned in the memo was a forthcoming app, and I was hoping you might be able to tell me what that might look like.

Lauf: What I can tell you is that you’ll see the release of our iOS app sometime in Q1 of this year. I can’t tell you details about what it is and what the interface is and all the rest of it.

Lichterman: Zach [Seward] said to AllThingsD in 2012, “Anyone can navigate directly to any of our stories. You can’t do that in the app store world.” Why an app now?

Lauf: In 2012, the very clear strategy for us was to create as little friction as possible to growth, because you start with an audience of zero. We did not want to create any barrier to either discovering or sharing our content. So whether it was a paywall or an app that you had to go download and that we hoped you would open, all of those things were barriers to introducing a brand-new media property to a new audience.

One of the hallmarks of the Quartz brand is our nimbleness and our ability to pivot when conditions require it. If you read one of Zach’s other memos about Quartz as an API, that’s a good example of this. Over the past four years, the places where people spend time reading have changed greatly. We’re trying to position ourselves to be wherever those users are.

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