What The Hell America!

Last week, G/O Media sold Quartz to a Canadian software company called Redbrick, firing the entire editorial staff along the way. It was the final death knell for Quartz, which had been cofounded by Zach Seward — now the editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times (and once a Nieman Lab assistant editor) — in 2012.

On Monday, Seward posted a blog post titled “What was Quartz?” to LinkedIn. It’s a fascinating read about Quartz’s journey through the hands of various owners, from original owner David Bradley to Japanese data firm Uzabase to the hands of Seward himself, who reportedly bought the company for a dollar, until it finally ended up in the stable of G/O Media and its notorious CEO, Jim Spanfeller. From Seward’s blog post:

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.

Still, Seward writes, the G/O era of Quartz started off inauspiciously; in the subject line of his email announcing the acquisition, Spanfeller misspelled the publication’s name as “Quarts.”

Spanfeller figures heavily in Seward’s post — it opens with an anecdote from Seward’s first day working for him, where Spanfeller told him “It’s impossible to kill a media brand” — and he isn’t exactly the most sympathetic figure. This isn’t much of a surprise; Spanfeller has been the heel of the media world practically since the day he took over as CEO of G/O media in 2019. What is surprising, however, is that Spanfeller responded to Seward’s post on LinkedIn, essentially blaming the unionized Quartz newsroom for their firing, which went down as well as you might expect:

As of writing, two of the three likes on Spanfeller’s response come from G/O media’s CTO and SVP of ad sales. I’ll leave you with another quote from Seward to get a sense of their leadership:

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.