“It’s impossible to kill a media brand,” Jim Spanfeller told me on my first day working for him, as we sat in his corner office. 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. So I was inclined to believe him.
But I knew it wasn’t true. Jim and his private-equity-backed digital-media conglomerate G/O Media had already destroyed several of their properties, some all at once (Deadspin), most of the others by sapping resources, antagonizing their staff, and undermining the editorial visions that once made them great (Jezebel, The Root). It would take him three years to do the same to Quartz.
The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list. I thought back to Jim’s comment. His cynical view of digital media was good neither for journalism nor business, but maybe Jim was right about that one thing. What is Quartz now if not a “media brand” that refuses to die?
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We launched Quartz in 2012 with prestigious editorial hires, a slick new website, bold pronouncements about the future of media, and a splashy profile in The New York Times in which we likened ourselves to a “pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy.” It sure felt that way. From a spare SoHo loft, and then increasingly fancier offices, we set out to be compelling, entertaining, serious, and excellent all at the same time. Everything was up for reinvention, from the structure of our stories to the design of our ads to the need for a traditional homepage. We believed that a news organization should stand for something, which in our case was globalism. Most of all, we put a strong emphasis on quality at a time when online journalism was still considered inferior to print publications that happened to have websites.
I think, in all those respects, we succeeded. Nothing about what ultimately transpired makes me regret the choices we made or the fun that we had. Quartz produced a lot of great journalism, served our readers well, and widely influenced the rest of our industry. If that’s all Quartz was in the end, I’ll take it.
Still, we also hoped to endure on the scale of centuries, just like rival news organizations — in particular, The Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal — that we viewed as our Goliaths. For a stretch in the middle there, it even seemed possible. 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. A trade publication, which once called Quartz “the very model a modern publisher,” started literally portraying us as pushing a boulder up a hill. Someone on our staff printed out the illustration and stuck it to a wall in our office, where it remained until the end.
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Twenty-eighteen would prove to be the peak of the endeavor and, not incidentally, the year our original owner, David Bradley, decided to sell. Quartz had attracted takeover interest over the years from major media companies like IAC and The New York Times and even, to our astonishment, the luxury fashion house LVMH. Their interest ultimately fizzled. It was a small Japanese financial data firm, Uzabase, that made the highest and final bid, at $86 million.
As business journalists, we of course recognized that Quartz was fundamentally a financial asset subject to the whims of market forces beyond our control. I may have known it intellectually, but still viewed Quartz as a movement out to prove something more noble. So when Uzabase gave up on us two years later, at the height of the pandemic, I quixotically decided to buy the company myself. The price tag was next-to-nothing but also required financing the buyout and taking on the risk of surviving, for the first time, as an independent company.
The two years we spent on our own was the most challenging stretch of my tenure at Quartz. I started having panic attacks. One morning shortly after the buyout, I fainted and fell limp to the floor of my bedroom. But it was also a freeing time. A new generation of employees breathed life into our journalism and products, while financial independence gave the company, which I incorporated as a public benefit corporation, new purpose. The Paycheck Protection Program, for small businesses affected by the pandemic, helped keep us afloat.
Investors who specialized in “distressed assets” would call from time-to-time. They all had the same idea: Fire most of the staff and reboot Quartz as an email-only publication focused on aggregation of business news. As a business model, it might have made sense, but it wasn’t appealing. Muddling along with few or no journalists would be a worse outcome, I felt, than just shutting the place down.
That is how I came to realize Quartz was, and always had been, its people. The hundreds of people who built and constantly rebuilt Quartz, who did the work, who supported each other through all the changes, who gave the place its values, and who brought those values to other companies when they moved on. (Quartz alumni are all over today’s great media companies, 22 of us at The Times alone.) We really did believe in what we were doing.
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So how did such an earnest enterprise end up in the maws of private equity? By 2022, we were running short of cash and didn’t have anyone willing to put up more money, especially as enthusiasm waned for the entire digital-media sector. We put together a quick M&A process and made clear that preference would go to anyone willing to take on all of the roughly 80 people still working at Quartz.
G/O was the only suitor willing to make that commitment, and still bid three times more than the next-highest offer. That meant there was enough cash in the deal to share more than $1 million of the proceeds with employees, who each got a stake in Quartz when we went independent. It was a far better outcome than I thought possible when we started the process, just desperate to survive.
My own investment would also turn out well, thanks to G/O’s stubborn insistence that it only wanted Quartz’s assets and not the corporate entity, which for complicated accounting reasons was still pretty valuable. I mention all these details, I must admit, out of spite. Jim would often talk about his feeling that journalists were bad businesspeople and taunt us about past decisions by asking, “How’d that work out for you?” Now G/O is in retreat, and today’s strongest for-profit media companies are run by former reporters.
At one point late in the sale process, Jim acted like he was no longer interested, and stopped returning my calls. That forced us to stare down the prospect of running completely out of cash and collapsing, Messenger-style, as Jim well knew. We had no choice but to call his bluff. He went ahead with the purchase.
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I put on a brave face, but we were under no illusions about the likely fate of Quartz under G/O’s ownership. The sale immediately prompted obituaries; New York magazine deemed us “the history of internet media in just 10 years,” which I still take as a compliment, even though we wanted 100 years.
It’s still not quite clear to me what Jim thought he was buying or why he was so desperate to have 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. But borrowing money was still incredibly cheap at that time (interest rates were about to surge, another case of good timing), and I guess the allure of an existing media brand was too hard to resist. In retrospect, “it’s impossible to kill” sounds to me less like an adage and more like a challenge.
Everyone who could quit did so as soon as they could. A few diehards held on longer, and were tortured or fired, or both, for their sacrifice. I left on the day my contract allowed it, exactly a year after the sale. G/O ultimately filled up the site with 2000s-era slideshows and AI-generated earnings stories. It took another two years for me to process the loss and for G/O to complete its demolition.
The media business often feels like a battle between idealists and cynics. Most of my favorite news startups of the current era have chosen the non-profit path, which has its own major challenges, but at least cynicism is not one of them. Quartz is now a zombie brand, which is the most cynical move in media.
I never wanted to write this piece while good people were still working at Quartz. Now it can be laid to rest.
