Quartz’s Seward searching for ways for quality journalism to prosper online

Zachary Seward

Matthew Flamm of Crain’s New York Business profiles Zachary Seward, chief product officer and executive editor at business news site Quartz.

Flamm writes, ‘He spent so much time covering embattled Harvard president Lawrence Summers for the Harvard Crimson that around the time he got the intel that Summers was stepping down, Seward had failed out of school.

“The good news was that he had a job at the Journal. A couple of years later, he was back at Harvard helping launch the Nieman Journalism Lab, dedicated to figuring out media’s digital future. He has that role at Quartz too. One mission of the Atlantic Media–owned business news website is to find ways for quality journalism to prosper online.

“In addition to co-founding Quartz with a former boss at the Journal, Kevin Delaney, Seward has outlined the product and editorial vision for the site’s email newsletters and mobile app, which has been downloaded 1 million times. Last year it nearly doubled its ad revenue. This year ad revenue for both the newsletters and the app are expected to grow by 100%. He has also worked on augmented-reality features that can be used by reporters and advertisers, and launched a bot studio to experiment with AI-imbued talking programs as a platform for journalism.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.