[HN Gopher] What Was Quartz?
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What Was Quartz?
Author : mooreds
Score : 136 points
Date : 2025-04-07 22:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zachseward.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zachseward.com)
| donohoe wrote:
| Zach nails it. He is the reason why I was involved briefly at the
| start and for where I am today.
|
| It was my first time leading a product team. We tried a lot of
| things that seemed strange at the time; no homepage, no app,
| native ads (done well imho), a scrolling stream instead of pages.
| Some of that broke. Some of it worked. A lot of it stuck around.
|
| RIP Quartz.
| coloneltcb wrote:
| the first publication (that I recall) that offered a chatbot
| for news too, right?
| donohoe wrote:
| Yeah, you might be right. I was gone by then so not 100%. Sam
| Williams was behind that app. I'm not a fan of chat apps but
| that was done really well and I was surprised by it.
| striking wrote:
| I really loved the Quartz chat app. I loved how carefully
| curated it was, how it didn't waste my time, how it gave me
| an outlay of just the things I care about. It felt a little
| like a friend was texting me about the news rather than
| just a dump of news itself.
|
| And I was a little sad when my friend stopped texting me.
| Drew_ wrote:
| Ditto on loving Quartz and the chat app around 2015 I think
| it was. After Quartz was gone, I didn't really find what I
| was looking for until I discovered Axios.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I was an avid reader when it first launched; really stood out
| from the rest at the time. Kudos.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Expected something about MacOS' Quartz.
| donohoe wrote:
| Then you dodged a bullet!
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I was expecting something about Magma's static timing engine
| Quartz (EDA world)
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| ... and I thought it was about Quartz scheduler. Wrote too much
| Java back in the days.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Or at least something about the quartz mineral.
| parpfish wrote:
| How does spanefeller and g/o have enough money to keep buying
| properties?
|
| All I ever hear about are his decisions that take unprofitable-
| but-beloved brands and turn them into detestable slop.
|
| Is slop actually that profitable?
| api wrote:
| It's almost free to produce, so anything you do make with it is
| pure margin. Quality media is expensive. Profit is income minus
| expenses.
| brazzy wrote:
| Maybe they're riding the AI hype and burning investor money?
| only-one1701 wrote:
| Not really sure why this is on Hackernews but let me be first to
| say: Spanfeller is a herb.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Jim Spanfeller is a herb!
| tclancy wrote:
| He is a herb, but no sage. Was a deadspin member back when you
| had to email Will to get an account.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Quartz was a great site - definitely felt like a proto-Axios both
| from a UX and content standpoint. Sad they weren't able to
| survive the pandemic era news industry implosion.
| unixhero wrote:
| Axios?
| alephnerd wrote:
| A similar short form news site primarily aimed at
| decisionmakers [0]
|
| [0] - https://www.axios.com/
| turnsout wrote:
| Quartz was a great site, with a really innovative iOS app on
| multiple fronts. They were always doing something interesting.
|
| It's sad that independent media faces such an uphill battle. At
| this point, what ambitious entrepreneur would ever entertain the
| idea of starting a media platform? The economics are simply not
| there.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "It's impossible to kill a media brand," "Still, we also hoped to
| endure on the scale of centuries"
|
| 2012 to nowt.
|
| I feel very sorry for Quartz and its staff. I'm not a fan of
| private equity firms or parasites as they are generally known.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's digital media in a nutshell. Either you try to do things
| the right way with subscribers and in-house advertising, or you
| chase clicks and Google Ads revenue like Buzzfeed and SPAC your
| way to riches before the bottom falls out of your valuation.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > _But Quartz never made money. We grew, between 2012 and 2018,
| to nearly 250 employees and $35 million in annual revenue. The
| dismal economics of digital media meant losing more than $40
| million over that stretch just to grow unsustainably large._
|
| Those are laughably terrible numbers. $35M/year ain't much, and,
| even at a glance, there's no way to support 250 decently-paid
| employees on it. All things considered, even 50 is pushing it.
|
| But if they thought outside-the-box a little bit, there might
| have been a way out: They could have gone into academic
| publishing. Academic publishers make money hand over fist.
| Elsevier made $3.5B in profit and >$10B in revenue just last
| year.
|
| Doing social sciences and political science stuff would have been
| a good fit for Quartz. You don't need any special permits to
| become an academic publisher. Most of your employees (reviewers)
| do it for free, like jannies. The industry is ripe for, uh,
| "disruption." Oh well.
| rchaud wrote:
| I remember browsing Quartz back in 2014-15 and being impressed
| that there was finally a current affairs focused "digital media"
| startup that wasn't styled like the odiously click-chasing
| Business Insider. The website design felt fresh, with a
| widescreen layout as opposed to the amateurish, single-column
| blog-like designs of Gawker and Buzzfeed.
|
| But things seemed to change not long after. Paywalls appeared
| everywhere, so while I could "see" the topics they covered, I
| couldn't read them. Over time I kept coming back to the website,
| remembering its cool design, and was disappointed to find fewer
| and fewer new articles.
|
| Just took a look at the site now, and sadly it just resembles any
| of those dime-a-dozen "content aggregator" sites like Forbes.com.
| gkanai wrote:
| That Uzabase ownership of Quartz never made sense. What a
| clueless decision. Buy an ad-based media property and change it
| to subscription- of course you'll make less with a major change
| in the business model.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Quartz wasn't "destroyed" by cynicism; it collapsed due to its
| own financial unsustainability.
|
| Investors didn't kill Quartz--they stopped subsidizing losses
| once it was clear Quartz couldn't become self-sufficient.
|
| The "cynical" narrative obscures Quartz's fundamental flaw: lack
| of a viable business model.
|
| Calling Quartz a victim overlooks that it repeatedly failed
| commercially, despite many chances and significant investment.
|
| Ultimately, Quartz's fate wasn't about cynicism, but about
| investors deciding to stop throwing money into a losing bet.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Ultimately, Quartz's fate wasn't about cynicism, but about
| investors deciding to stop throwing money into a losing bet.
|
| So would you say that the investors... became cynical?
| zidad wrote:
| They say an optimist is just a cynic lacking experience
| gwd wrote:
| Skeptical and cynical are not the same thing.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Lack of a viable business model is precisely what Zach points
| to in the article, which doesn't preclude him from feeling a
| bit sad about how it was stripped for parts.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Reporting news accurately is a very difficult business model in
| a world full of oligarch-backed papers that constantly lose
| money to further their own agenda, plus social media which is
| increasingly indifferent as to whether the links they circulate
| have any truth in them or not.
| GCA10 wrote:
| It's tempting to blame oligarchs and social media, but I'll
| argue that readers' own tastes are the most daunting
| challenge that mainstream journalism has faced for the past
| 20 years.
|
| People will spend a lot more time (and money!) reinforcing
| their existing beliefs/prejudices than learning about
| something new.
| favorited wrote:
| Spanfeller believing "it's impossible to kill a media brand" goes
| a long way towards explaining everything I've ever heard about
| him.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > He had just bought the business news organization, Quartz, that
| I had spent the past decade building and, most recently, trying
| desperately to save from oblivion.
|
| If he believed in the business so much, why did you sell his
| company?
|
| Seems like you lose all rights to comment, the moment you sell
| your company.
| jjeaff wrote:
| sometimes, selling to someone with deep pockets is the only way
| to save a company.
| GoRudy wrote:
| Nothing about that article surprises me regarding G/O but there
| is one point that Zach makes about his transaction that he is
| wrong about:
|
| "Thanks to G/O's stubborn insistence that it only wanted Quartz's
| assets and not the corporate entity"...
|
| this is not stubborn it's quite common and is absolutely the
| right thing to do for many companies interested in another
| business. If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes
| with all the legal liability.
|
| Zach probably doesn't understand how much more likely his deal
| was to close as an asset purchase rather than a stock purchase. A
| stock purchase comes with lots more diligence and legalese. If
| they are buying your stock they are buying all your baggage and
| potential legal matters, it requires a lot more work including a
| laundry list of representations by the seller. G/O did everyone a
| favor by sticking to an asset purchase and getting the deal done.
| that's where the positives end it seems.
| hansvm wrote:
| > If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes with all
| the legal liability
|
| For dying companies, most of the time it's fraudulent and
| illegal to create a transaction divesting the good assets from
| the bad debts. Why is that potential problem not an issue for a
| proposal to sell off everything good and leave behind an
| insolvent shell?
| disillusioned wrote:
| I mean, this is literally what an Assignment for the Benefit
| of Creditors (ABC) acquisition is (or an Article 9) and the
| specific goal of an ABC is to allow for some semblance of the
| company's assets to persist unencumbered by an acquirer and
| without creditors having any further rights to their debts,
| aside from what they can claim from the proceeds of the ABC.
|
| It's an alternative to bankruptcy that allows for the
| continued functioning of the business in many cases, and it
| absolutely leaves behind an insolvent shell. (And acquirers
| will go through great pains to avoid incurring "successor
| liability.")
| vetrom wrote:
| I'm not sure you answered the question here though, why
| should that sort of transaction be legal? Is there a
| compelling public interest in allowing this sort of
| transaction?
| devilbunny wrote:
| It's a pretty common way for companies to go through
| bankruptcy. If the courts can identify a viable business
| inside the company, where the main problem is debt that
| it can't feasibly pay, they will allow it to proceed with
| business while cancelling the debt. Since the alternative
| is having _the whole thing_ go under, without much chance
| of creditors being made whole, there is a benefit to
| society: some of the people keep their jobs.
| GoRudy wrote:
| That's not how these things work. When a company sells an
| asset the funds go back to the company that sold that asset.
| So if the "seller" has debts or other obligations those still
| remain and proceeds from the sale would go towards satisfying
| those. However, in this case it sounds like the deal was
| largerly about the employee costs + some cash to the sellers.
| immibis wrote:
| He also states the corporate entity was quite valuable for
| complicated accounting reasons. I take that to mean he was not
| paid for the quite valuable thing since it wasn't transferred.
| After the money and assets were transferred, I take it that he
| eventually realized that a corporate entity has no actual value
| by itself, the buyout price can be anything and could have
| included the value of the corporate entity if he wanted, even
| if it wasn't transferred, and that statement was just a trick
| to pay him less money.
| dmurray wrote:
| I took it to mean that the corporate entity had some
| favourable tax treatment (perhaps from losses in previous
| years, which could offset against future profits). Which
| indeed means the corporate entity has no value by itself, but
| it has some value if you can turn it back into a functioning
| business.
|
| G/O either had their own tax shelters that meant they
| wouldn't benefit additionally from the favourable tax
| treatment, and/or didn't want to take the risk of assuming
| unknown liabilities (which Zach Seward could have known
| didn't exist, but would have required more DD from G/O to
| rule out).
| munchler wrote:
| > it. In the subject line of his email announcing the deal, he
| spelled our name "Quarts," and that set the tone for the level of
| care in what he had bought.
|
| This little detail seems to sum up so much about this kind of
| acquisition.
| refuser wrote:
| > The Paycheck Protection Program, for small businesses affected
| by the pandemic, helped keep us afloat.
|
| In the grand scheme of PPP shenanigans it's nothing, but how was
| an online-only _news_ website negatively impacted by perhaps the
| most globally relevant, urgent, and ongoing news story of the
| internet age?
| Danieru wrote:
| Ad spending got put on hold or canceled during the covid
| recession. Companies in all sectors moved to conserve cash.
|
| Even Google froze hiring.
|
| It was a good time to have a conservative balance sheet. I
| bought some good stock on the cheap, and hired my best
| programmer.
| nottorp wrote:
| > and hired my best programmer.
|
| And they're still around? Or moved on when hiring defroze
| again, to get a non covid salary?
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| I used to read Quartz everyday. As a gen z digital native, Quartz
| was my first foray into reading journalism daily. It's clean
| interface, direct and high-quality writing style, and lack of
| clickbait appealed a lot to me.
|
| These days, I read print newspapers everyday. But I still find
| myself wishing Quartz existed. I have not found any suitable
| replacement for it, and I am on the lookout for the same.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I really miss the Quartz I used to read a decade ago, does anyone
| know of any similar media orgs out there?
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Maybe arstechnica
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Na, I read that but it really doesn't have the same kind of
| business focus that qz did
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Hmmmm... there also used to be Wired. But they've moved
| away from hard journalism and neutral reporting of
| technology to more sensationalism and opinion articles.
| RhetoricX wrote:
| Give 404 Media a try. They do a lot of original investigative
| tech journalism.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Yep they're on the list!
| GCA10 wrote:
| The "Roshamon Effect" always kicks in when people share their
| personal perspectives about time working at a turbulent
| organization, but even so, I was surprised that this piece made
| no mention of Quartz's founding editor-in-chief and co-CEO, Kevin
| Delaney.
|
| I'd overlapped with Kevin during a different period, and he was
| always a fountain of fascinating ideas. At Quartz, I though he
| showed great skill in championing expertise in niche areas, under
| the banner "Our Obsessions." He (or his team) were uniquely bold
| online in the way they let memorable photos carry more of the
| weight.
|
| Once Kevin left in 2019, at least from my reader's perspective,
| all the air went out of the balloon
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Does anyone understand the economics of private equity buying a
| company like Quartz only to dismantle it and sell off its parts?
| Aside from brand destruction, it seems like a difficult way to
| actually make money? I mean can an email list be _that_ valuable?
| whalesalad wrote:
| Was hoping this would be a deep dive into the Quartz compositor.
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