Quartz, Atlantic Media's newest digital business news venture, launched Monday with an interactive website geared toward tablet and mobile readers.
Hoping to tap into a rapidly-growing market of mobile readers, Quartz designed its site to adapt to the size of the screen of its browser. It features a responsive design with tactile scroll bars on the top and left side and a Facebook-like toolbar. It offers top stories, latest posts, popular pieces and starred and search tabs. (pictured left, as viewed on an iPad 2)
"Quartz is intended to embody the era in which we're creating it, like Wired in the 1990s, Rolling Stone in the 1960s, Fortune in the 1930s, and The Economist in the 1840s," editor-in-chief Kevin J. Delaney wrote in an inaugural post on the site.
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The site has been long awaited as media watchers chattered about its hiring process — targeting those blending the "spirit of generosity" with the intellect of Ph.Ds — and its reported early feud with The Economist over the poaching of a journalist.
Unlike its British rival — which turned 169 years old this month — or, for that matter, most other publications in this competitive space such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, Quartz has no plans to erect a paywall. Instead, it hopes to sustain the site on ad sales and sponsorships alone.
"Quartz is totally free, with no paywall to get in your way," Delaney wrote. "We're ad-supported."