Quartz is almost done. But what a journey it was!

I've been thinking about Quartz lately. Not the mineral but the news media that was once a model for us when we were creating a small independent news outlet back in 2014.

Now Quartz is almost done.

But let’s get back to 2014 and to my news media. That was my very first serious media project, and we were desperately looking for inspiration. At that time, I had my own small news website about the media industry (called MediaMedia), and in 2012, I wrote an article about Quartz. I had been covering it from the very first mentions of "some venture that The Atlantic is going to start" till the day they were sold to G/O. That was the first time I followed the creation of a news media from day 0.

Then Quartz launched. And its website was almost perfect.

So two years later (in 2014), we've disassembled WordPress and assembled it again based on our needs, with Quartz's inspirational design in mind. It was like taking apart a car engine, understanding how each piece works, and then rebuilding it with modifications to make it truly ours. The process was painful but incredibly rewarding.

Quartz was one of the first news media of the new era. They even bought a small AI company called Intelligentsia in 2016 (long before AI became mainstream and everyone started putting it in their pitch decks). In general, the 2010s was the decade when we saw Quartz, Axios, Vox, The Information, De Correspondent... when news media started to think about design, UX, UI, interfaces, and technology in general. That was the time when concept and idea started to be the thing in news media.

The old model of "let's just put some news on a page" died, and a new approach of "let's think about how people actually consume information" was born. It was some kind revolutionary.

I was reading new Zach Seward's piece about what happened to Quartz (he started it and even owned it for a while), and it made me nostalgic. The way he described their journey from a "pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy" to being sold to G/O Media, who eventually killed it, feels like watching the lifecycle of an entire media generation compressed into a decade.

What strikes me is how the death of these innovative media outlets often follows the same pattern: they get acquired by people who fundamentally don't understand what made them special in the first place. It's like watching someone buy a race car and then complain that it's terrible for grocery shopping.

The dashboard graveyards I wrote about recently? That's a symptom of the same disease — focusing on metrics that don't matter instead of understanding the core value of what you're building. Quartz understood its value proposition. They knew exactly what they were and what they weren't. We tried to learn that lesson when building our own thing.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't had Quartz as a model. Would we have created something completely different? Something worse? Or maybe something better? It's impossible to know, but I'm grateful for the inspiration they provided during those formative years.

The media landscape continues to evolve, and we're seeing new models emerge. But there was something special about that 2010s era of media experimentation that I miss. It felt like everything was possible, and the rules were being rewritten in real-time.

So here's to Quartz — not what it became in the end, but what it represented at its best: the idea that journalism could be both serious and beautiful, both global and personal, both innovative and substantive. We tried to carry that torch in our own small way.

And maybe that's the real legacy of these pioneering media outlets. Not just the content they produced, but the other media ventures they inspired along the way. Like ripples in a pond, spreading outward long after the original stone has sunk.