It seems like a terrible time to be launching a news operation.
However, there are opportunities and niches, and the new digital media launch called Quartz from Atlantic Media Co seeks to exploit them.
Quartz is set to launch in the coming weeks as a “100 percent digital” news operation covering “the most important themes of the new global economy,” editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney said.
Quartz has been recruiting a small number of veteran journalists for an overall news staff of around 25 people. The operation will features tablet and mobile displays, and a desktop Web site, qz.com.
“There is an opportunity to do great journalism on a digital platform,” Delaney, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Online, told reporters. “It’s a great time to launch a project like this.”
Quartz will offer free content, with revenue coming from advertising, aiming to cover key global business issues and reach readers around the world.
“We’re really confident in the ad-supported model,” Delaney said. “There has been strong advertiser interest.”
The name was chosen “because it embodies the new brand’s essential character: global, disruptive and digital. Quartz, the mineral, is found all over the world, and plays an important role in tectonic activity,” a statement said.
Analysts say the project has the potential to succeed, but that it will not be easy.
Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst and consultant with the research firm Outsell, said there is a market for well-produced financial news — and advertisers are eager to reach these readers — but the competition is fierce.
Quartz will be up against industry “behemoths” such as Dow Jones, Bloomberg, Reuters and the Financial Times, he said.
For Quartz to succeed, “they have to decide which audience they going after, and how to serve it in a different way than the other giants do,” Doctor said. “It’s definitely an uphill battle, but it has a strong ability to succeed, if Atlantic Media is willing to put at least three years into it.”
Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor who follows new media, said Atlantic Media, which also publishes the Washington-based National Journal, is one of the few media organizations doing well with free online content.
“It sounds like they are going for a high-end audience, which is affluent and well-educated,” Kennedy said.
Even though the news industry is facing a severe crisis, analysts point out there are always opportunities for new players with a winning strategy.
Other recent launches include a magazine called Du Jour from the Gilt Group and HuffPost Live, a streaming video site from the AOL-owned Huffington Post.
Doctor said that with lower technology costs and social marketing, the barriers to entry for a new venture are lower than just a few years ago.
“It’s much easier to become known through social marketing, which is essentially free,” he said.
Perhaps more significantly, the lines are being blurred between print news, Web sites and broadcast media. Web sites are offering streaming video and sites like HuffPost Live are effectively competing with television news.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts