Quartz

From their website:

Quartz is a digitally native news outlet, born in 2012, for business people in the new global economy. We publish bracingly creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview, built primarily for the devices closest at hand: tablets and mobile phones.

Like Wired in the 1990s and The Economist in the 1840s, Quartz embodies the era in which it is being created. The financial crisis that recently engulfed much of the world wasn’t just a cyclical decline or a correction or even a bubble bursting. It was a breaking point. And its shockwaves exposed a fundamentally changed economic order with new leaders and ways of doing business.

Our coverage of this new global economy is rooted in a set of defining obsessions: core topics and knotty questions of seismic importance to business professionals. These are the issues that energize our newsroom, and we invite you to obsess about them along with us. You can always reach us by emailinghi@qz.com.

Quartz’s founding team includes veterans of some of the world’s highest-quality news organizations who have reported in 115 countries and speak 19 languages. Our main office is in New York City, and we have correspondents and staff reporters in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. We expect to expand quickly to other locations.

We’re also a nerdy bunch, embracing the opportunity to create a newsroom that is wholly focused on digital storytelling. We view the creation of Quartz as just the beginning of an ongoing process in discovering the best ways to report and deliver information online. Developers and journalists, sometimes one-and-the-same, sit next to each other in the Quartz newsroom as we continually iterate and experiment. We know that the future of news will be written in code.

As we build Quartz, we are focused on the touchscreen and mobile devices that increasingly dominate our lives. Our design began with the iPad foremost in mind, and we modified it from there to suit smartphones and, finally, personal computers. Your experience with Quartz should befit the hardware you visit us with and shift as seamlessly as you do from phone to tablet to laptop and back again. Call us a website or, if you like, a web app: Quartz combines the benefits of the free and open Web with the elegance of an application.

In all that we do at Quartz, we embrace openness: open source code, an open newsroom, and open access to the data behind our journalism. We’ll try to be as transparent with you as possible about the decisions we make and where we are headed.

Last Updated: July 7, 2016

Could Beijing be the Healthiest City in China?

Lilly Kuo
Quartz
Beijing, despite its reputation for dangerous levels of air pollution, choking traffic, and food scandals, is the healthiest city in China.

China Tells Citizens to Walk, Bike, and Snitch in “United Struggle” to Breathe Easier

Lily Kuo
Quartz
The environmental ministry has published a set of guidelines for citizens, which encourage them not only to reduce their personal environmental imprint, but to also turn in polluting and wasteful neighbors. 

The End of China’s Hated Hukou System is Less Ground-breaking Than It Seems

Richard Macauley
Quartz
The new rules only make it easier for formerly rural hukou holders to move to small, backwater cities, not the vibrant mega-cities along China’s eastern coast where the vast majority of migrants are.

The Diplomatic Battle Between China and Japan is Taking a Latin American Road Trip

Lily Kuo
Quartz
When Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe appeals to officials and business people in Central and South America this week, his hosts will be comparing him to another recent visitor: Chinese president Xi Jinping.

See What China Sees When It Searches For “Tiananmen” and Other Loaded Terms

Nikhil Sonnad
Quartz
Blocked on Weibo is one of the most interesting websites on the internet: A list that explains the search terms that are censored on China’s massive microblogging site Weibo.

Why China is Censoring ‘The Big Bang Theory’ but not ‘Game of Thrones’

Lily Kuo
Quartz
While authorities speak of “cleaning the web” of offensive content, they may be more worried about reminding the country’s flourishing private internet firms that the government is still in charge.

Beijing Buys a Waste Management Company to Solve Its Pollution Problems—But It Won’t Work

Adam Pasick
Quartz
Beijing’s municipal government controls its own infrastructure company, the Beijing Capital Group, which means it can spend $798 million to buy New Zealand’s biggest waste management company.

More Than Half of China’s Most Powerful Officials Have Links to Tax Havens. Now What?

Heather Timmons
Quartz
Relatively loose cencorship of the recent offshore tax reports has some thinking that the CCP is ready to talk. 

China Is Getting Better at Influencing Media Outside China

Lily Kuo
Quartz
Freedom House says China is investing in a soft-power media push, like offering free editorial content to news organizations that can’t afford to send correspondents to China and publishing inserts of China Daily’s English edition in major...

A Lot of U.S. Plastic Isn’t Actually Being Recycled Due to the Green Fence

Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
The US may have Save the Earth campaigns to thank for the embrace of recycling. But more likely, it was made possibly by China’s emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse. The more China made, the more it needed used plastics. 

How China Added $1 Trillion to its Economy by Fudging Data

Tim Fernholz
Quartz
China’s economy could be $1 trillion smaller than it says. A professor at Peking University lays out the case in a new working paper that finds some very strange patterns in China’s official statistics. A professor at...

Chinese Weibo Users Are Salivating Over Detroit’s Bankruptcy

Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
Millions commented on the CCTV post about Detroit on Sina Weibo. As one user put it, “Seven-hundred thousand people, quiet, clean air, no pollution, democracy — what are you waiting for?” 

Why It’s News That China’s President Stood In The Rain With His Pants Rolled Up

Lily Kuo
Quartz
Xi—who has promised to tackle government corruption and lavish spending by officials—is trying to counter an image of elitism in dress, plain speech, and a few gestures of openness rarely seen at the upper rungs of China’s communist party.

A Chinese City is Asking Its Companies to Pay Public Sector Salaries Because It Can’t Afford Them

Jake Maxwell Watts
Quartz
Local government debt is now so unwieldy in China that some desperate city governments, such as that of western Ordos, have turned to the private sector for help to pay their employees. 

What Will Get Chinese People to Sip Bubbly?

Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
Though China is the world’s fifth-largest wine market, people just don’t go for bubbly that much. Moët Hennessy is trying to alter that trend by opening a new French chateau in poor and predominantly Muslim Ningxia.