Thursday 8th October: Quartz is up for sale again, just two years after acquisition

October 08, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

Japan's Uzabase is looking to offload Quartz after acquiring the brand in 2018 for $86 million. It expects to sell it for less than this, and has cited the economic fallout from coronavirus as a key reason for wanting an early exit. One of Uzabase's core reasons for acquiring Quartz in the first place was to drive its expansion outside of Asia, and particularly in subscription revenue. Quartz launched a membership scheme in late 2018 and a paywall in May 2019, but it hasn't attracted the anticipated numbers of paying subscribers.

To understand why Quartz struggled, I'd highly recommend a piece by Digiday's Steven Perlberg published a few months ago, where he describes the site as being caught in the mushy middle; "not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale". Even a recent coronavirus-driven surge in subscriptions left it falling short of expectations.

I'll finish with The Media Nut's Josh Sternberg, who wrote this brilliant summary: "Quartz was a great idea, executed very well, and then not as much. It experimented with forms, both editorial and advertising, building an audience along the way. But in the end, compromise begat compromise, mobile-first morphed regressed back to the desktop mean, advertising went from high-touch creative to run-of-the-mill display, stories focused on and for the business executive bled into stories about everything meaning the once-valued content became a commodity."

One from our own Peter Houston. He emphasises that revenue diversification is key to the long-term survival of media owners, and that the pandemic has only highlighted this. Without diversification, "no vaccine in the world can protect your business against the future that publishing faces," he argues.

Until last week, Brian Morrissey was the president and editor in chief at Digiday. Now he's struck out on his own, and has dedicated the first edition of his personal newsletter to take a look back at the memo he wrote in 2011 about how to build Digiday into a leading media brand. It is an excellent read.

This is a great move from a media owner. It's not going to fix the root of the issues in media, but it's providing opportunities for diverse creatives to land gigs in news and magazine media that often go to a small group of the same people.

Throwback Thursday:

This seems like a good time to throw back to our interview with Brian, talking about publishing economics and sustainability, and the value of being really honest about change. Published back in 2019 when a snowstorm was the biggest worry we had.

The latest in our mini-series is live, featuring The Guardian's The Spin podcast producer Geoff Gein. Geoff says editing is an essential part of the podcasting process, don’t underestimate how much time it takes. And although podcasting is not rocket science, get expert advice to help you build out infrastructure and fix formats quickly.