What We Have Learned So Far

The notion of Quartz, like all good ideas, is really a simple one: 1. There is a burgeoning group of global business professionals who are starved for time and insight and who are vociferous adopters of mobile devices and the open, social web. 2. Our approach to this audience is to serve them with a new, global perspective on important developments that impact their businesses delivered on devices they hold close at hand, in a speedy and seamless way and in a "language" they understand and appreciate.3. Our approach to marketers is to deliver advertising that's as much a part of the experience as fashion advertising is in the September issue of Vogue. But ideas only matter if they are well-executed, so we've been focused for the past year or so on execution. Here is an attempt to share what we've learned from that endeavor so far. At the top of the list is that quality matters most: quality of content, quality of ideas, quality of our people, quality of advertising, quality of engineering. It is our best stories - those with original insight or incredible writing or amazing infographics - that garner the most traffic and attention. The same holds true for the performance and reaction to advertising on Quartz - if it's good, it works, if it's average or worse, it's ignored. While this may seem a subjective notion - and often it is - getting quality right is critical, which is why the people matter so much. Good stuff gets rewarded in the more meritocratic social web. Design also matters. Design in both the sense of aesthetics, but also in UX. Quartz has been praised for its clean look and feel, its sleek use of color and fonts. It's also been recognized for its elegant, touch-and-swipe user interface. We feel strongly that this kind of reaction is indicative of the kind of loyalty you can build by making the entire experience more pleasurable via design. Most content distribution partnerships don't drive direct traffic, users and great content do.It's critical to populate your media organization with digital natives and risk-takers - people who understand how the web works and what its ethos is (and there is an ethos that can either reward or penalize depending on your understanding of it). It's sometimes daunting to challenge conventional wisdom or to push things that are outside the tried and true business models, but to be a leader, your organization needs this element to have a strong voice. Focus on the future. Every dollar, every man-hour, every bit of intellectual energy you spend on retrofitting for legacy systems is a dollar, a chunk of time or an idea stripped away from building for the future. Be careful with those resources. For example, at launch, Quartz was not really compatible with older versions of Internet Explorer. While on the one hand, the IE install base is large, on the other, Quartz is focused on trying to attract a more forward-leaning audience - the one that upgrades and uses different browsers, the one that has already adopted use of tablets and phones to read news and commentary. Had we spent more time ensuring we fit with the early versions of IE, we're pretty convinced you wouldn't have as much of the innovation you currently see on the site - we simply wouldn't have had the "room". Better to leave some dinosaurs behind and let them catch up than to slow down and wait for them before you move.Engineers and developers are heroes and need to be fully integrated into the organization, not compartmentalized. Innovating in frontier technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 means you need talented, dedicated problem-solvers and creators.The ad market is fickle, but there remains a firm and growing hunger among marketers to create and distribute content beyond just "advertising" to engage audiences. I'll underscore - this is where quality and authenticity come in.This may sound self-serving and/or hackneyed, but it's demonstrably true - users actually like ads if they're good and they're rendered in a way that's additive to the experience versus interruptive. There may be times when we're just a little too far out ahead of where the marketplace is. But it's ok to be "just a little" out in front and I'd rather be there than just a little too far behind where the marketplace is - every time. See the IE example above; there are some advertisers not yet equipped to work with HTML5 or custom content, but eventually they'll get there and for the ones that are ready, we're a very compelling, differentiated choice right now; even we land somewhere between 30-40% of visitors coming to us on tablets and phones...that percentage will continue to grow and we'll already have learned and iterated and optimized along the way to have the best user experience as readers migrate to these platforms.It gets messy - building something from scratch requires a fortitude among your foundational players that powers the organization and the others through the moments when systems aren't mature, courses need correcting, positions go unfilled or job descriptions morph. Don't do a start-up if you can't stomach uncertainty and change.I stress that this is what we've learned so far because the learning will never end and I'm confident what Quartz looks like and does will change as we learn, but the North Star is likely to remain: to provide high quality information and experience for a growing population of post-national professionals and a sophisticated, elegant, efficacious platform for marketers who want to speak to them. _________________________________________________________________ Jim Lauf is senior vice president/group publisher at Atlantic Media Company, where he serves as the publisher of Quartz (qz.com) and in an advisory capacity to the leadership team at The Atlantic. Before his time with Atlantic, Lauf was instrumental in the reinvigoration of Wired magazine following the dot-com collapse.

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What We Have Learned So Far

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