Quartz, the new business news site from The Atlantic, launched last week. The Atlantic is a great magazine and I've been a subscriber for years; David Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media, discussed in the NYT how he "loves the romance of print" but that the economic realities of the day have finally forced him to expand into digital for the first time. The foray into digital promises to be unique, offering "a tablet-first mindset; a digitally appropriate structure; an app-like interface; a new-world business model." The site will be primarily built for mobile, meaning that they will not get revenue from banner ads and that sponsored content will be built into the editorial stream, which some may find to be a troubling digital editorial trend.
In its design, Quartz is truly trying to mimic the "magazine experience" just in digital form. As opposed to the nytimes.com title page that lists all of the news that it has covered within, Quartz's opening page has one main article with one big headline to bring in its viewers; in this way, Quartz is confident that it knows its audience well enough to present them with one article to start here with. Furthermore, once the reader finishes this article, the website brings you to the next article that it believes to be pertinent to its readership. It is an interesting method to make a website not all-encompassing but one that actually cultivates a brand from a like-minded readership, much like what a subscription to a monthly/weekly magazine used to mean. While I think this is nice, it does lead to its own digital-world problems of ease of scroll and search; Quartz is not an easy to navigate website and this may end up hurting them if they can't adapt functionally to the digital interface. Will this gawker-type interface be attractive to those who want to read about business news? Also interesting is that the website does not allow for comments after its articles - this reinforces that it is trying to purely bring its magazine into the digital forum, letting its own content speak for itself, which seems to separate it from the more democratic digital forum of blogs and most other magazine websites. Will the digital reader be happy with this? Will the advertiser? Particularly since Quartz is free - as opposed to the Economist and other type sites - the website can rely on a large amount of its traffic coming from links from social platforms, which are more effective at sending viewers to other free websites than to FT.com/WSJ.com/economist-type applications.
Check out the digital magazine here: www.qz.com
- Laura Hawkins
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