Quartz

Six trends the new Quartz app has joyfully piggybacked

The new Quartz app is fun, perhaps divisive, but bang on trend, showing us what content distribution might look like soon.

When Quartz was founded, it was pretty revolutionary for news on the web – mobile first, big bold text, single stream layout, changing topics, great data viz, free to use (!), a daily digest email, etc.

Since then, it has adapted somewhat to compete with click bait on social media, but hasn’t really been ‘bleeding edge’ in rapidly-evolving mobile.

The Quartz app changes that. Here are six things to take note of, that all media companies should be investigating.

Quartz: what’s so great about it?

What’s so great about Quartz?

Quartz is a business news publication that’s been talked about a lot since its founding, by Atlantic Media Company (publishes The Atlantic), in 2012.

It’s built on WordPress, is mobile-first and characterised by a strong team of journalists that produces engaging short and long content that’s incredibly sharable.

Here’s some more answers to the question ‘what’s so great about Quartz?’

Three reasons to bet on commenting for marketing ROI

“Don’t you think dreams and the internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.” Paprika — 2006

I recently watched a 2006 Japanese anime called Paprika where the quote above comes from. After it was recommended to me, I learned that Christopher Nolan has cited Paprika as an influence on his 2010 feature film, Inception…so to say it was a bit ahead of its time is probably an understatement.

When the character Paprika (who is a sort of repressed personality herself, but I won’t say too much to keep from spoiling the plot) offers this viewpoint it reminded me to revisit a very important area for today’s web marketers to pay attention; that of social commenting.

While online commenting has to date been a very frustrating for all of us, not to mention brand agnostic, for the very reason offered in this quote, times are changing and marketers need to take note.