The sale of US newsbrand Quartz with the loss of nearly all its staff on 4 April has led some to accuse G/O Media of running a once widely-admired title into the ground.
But G/O Media chief executive Jim Spanfeller has now hit back at those who have accused his company of turning Quartz into a “zombie brand” filled with “AI slop”.
Spanfeller told Press Gazette that things were “rather dire” at Quartz when it was bought by G/O Media for less than $10m in 2022 and that he believes the brand’s future is now “extremely bright”.
Quartz was sold on 4 April to Canadian software company Redbrick for what Spanfeller described as “a lot more” than its purchase price.
“This was a positive transaction for us,” he said. Consumer product/deals site The Inventory was also part of the sale.
But Redbrick wanted to keep just two members of the Quartz newsroom, including editor-in-chief Dan Hirschhorn, with the acquisition, resulting in around ten people losing their jobs. The firing of the staff by G/O Media was described by GMG Union, which represented the newsroom, as “a new low for a company that has tried to disrespect, undermine, and exploit its newsroom at every turn”.
Redbrick did not respond to a request for comment but said in a press release that it would help Quartz “develop direct relationships with audiences, deliver personalised experiences wherever people are watching, and create a more sustainable ecosystem with better advertising touchpoints”.
Redbrick said it plans to integrate Quartz with newsletter advertising platform Paved, which it acquired last month, and that this would help “better monetise” the business brand’s more than one million newsletter subscribers.
Quartz became ‘zombie brand’ according to co-founder
Quartz was founded in 2012 and six years later had almost 250 employees and was making $35m in annual revenue, according to co-founder Zach Seward. It also boasted “top journalists and a clear vision on covering the global economy”, according to media consultant David Kaplan. But it had not become profitable and is reported to have lost about $6.9m in 2021.
Original owner Atlantic Media sold Quartz to Japanese business insights company Uzabase for $86m but this lasted just two years. Seward paid “next-to-nothing” to look after the company through the Covid-19 pandemic until the difficulties facing the digital media industry (epitomised by cuts and closures at the likes of Buzzfeed and Vice) meant Quartz was “running short of cash”.
Seward said G/O Media, which is owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, was the only potential buyer willing to make a commitment to keep all the roughly 80 staff (of whom 50 were journalists) working at Quartz at the time and the takeover took place in April 2022.
Seward told Press Gazette at the time that he hoped the new ownership would mean “our newsroom can just be laser-focused on great journalism, serving our readers, growing that readership” with less need to worry about future financing or the state of the ad market.
[Read more from April 2022: Quartz founder Zach Seward says being part of G/O Media will let it focus on the journalism]
But Seward, who is now editorial director of AI initiatives at The New York Times, wrote last week that after G/O Media’s ownership: “Quartz is now a zombie brand, which is the most cynical move in media.”
Speaking to Press Gazette after Seward published his blog, Spanfeller argued that this was an attempt to recreate history: “It was a zombie brand when he sold it to us.”
Seward had revealed that G/O Media bid three times higher than any rival offers even though, as Spanfeller said: “It was not a lot of money… he said that if we hadn’t come along they would have gone out of business… So I’m sorry, what was wrong about that?”
Spanfeller said Quartz quickly became profitable under G/O Media ownership although he admitted this “wasn’t a huge masterstroke of management” as it benefitted from being part of a bigger company.
But he added: “And then on top of that we built the brand. There’s a strong affinity for Quartz in the advertising marketplace and obviously in the reader marketplace. It wasn’t like we recreated the wheel. We just were able to, I guess, draft off that: by increasing the efficacy and efficiency of the technology and building the amount of engagement, we were rewarded.”
G/O boss Jim Spanfeller: Quartz has seen ‘meteoric rise’ in traffic
According to Spanfeller, Quartz saw a 300% increase in page views in its final ten months of G/O Media ownership following a change in editorial strategy. He described a “meteoric rise once we switched things around in the newsroom. It took off.”
The publisher reported in April 2024 that Quartz’s Comscore traffic in Q1 2024 was up 212% year on year and 311% quarter on quarter.
However data from digital market intelligence company Similarweb shows worldwide desktop and mobile visits to Quartz have fallen by 32% in the past year to 2.8 million visits in March. Similarweb said this is down 20% in the past two years, 59% compared to three years ago and 85% compared to March 2020.
A possible explanation for the discrepancy is that visits are counted when a visitor accesses one or more pages during a session, with subsequent page views included in the same visit until the user is inactive for 30 minutes or more. This means page views may increase sharply via a strategy of reducing a site’s bounce rate, without it being reflected in a rise in visits.
Spanfeller said when Quartz came to G/O Media: “It was a shadow of what it had been.” He claimed that one reason was they needed to change the idea of it being a “reporter-led newsroom” in which “reporters all chose what stories to write, when they wanted to write it, and how much time it should take”.
“To some extent, there’s a place for that,” Spanfeller said. “But to have your entire newsroom around that probably doesn’t work out too well and it sort of goes against the very ethos – whether you think it’s a good ethos or a bad ethos – of what digital media is all about which is basically real time feedback loop…
“So we just turned the dial on Quartz and we said let’s be more strategic about the areas that we cover, the companies that we cover.
“We didn’t suggest how they should be covered. We didn’t say, oh you’ve got to be positive or negative or whatever. Just cover them or cover the topics. So, you know, what new technology adoption is driving businesses forward? What’s improving companies’ core competencies? What are companies most in demand for in terms of knowledge? And so by doing that, we saw around 300% growth in page views over the course of ten months.
“Now, that was a big mindset change, if you can imagine, within the newsroom. And so I don’t know that we fired many people. I think a lot of people left, that that was not what they wanted to do.”
He praised current editor-in-chief Hirschhorn as “the guy that really put this into place and made it work”.
Accusations of ‘2000s-era slideshows and AI slop’
In his blog, Seward said “G/O ultimately filled up the site with 2000s-era slideshows and AI-generated earnings stories” and was carrying out a “demolition”.
The company’s union similarly accused Spanfeller of “loading it up with AI slop” in a “race to the bottom”.
In response, Spanfeller said: “We’ve been very clear about this from the get-go – we were experimenting. We were looking at things.”
He said the earnings reports had been machine created for years because they are additive to the experience but do not drive significant page views themselves.
“Does any individual earnings report get huge traffic? No. And would it make sense for us to assign a reporter to do each of these earnings reports? No. But to have earnings reports on the site is an advantage. It’s an advantage for the end user, and it’s an advantage for us because we have better engagement.”
Quartz had also begun publishing AI rewrites from other outlets under the byline “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom”. Spanfeller said the idea behind this was to “experiment with AI and see if we can get a process that takes away a lot of the drudgery of re-reporting stories” and described the scale of this AI newsroom’s output as “relatively de minimis”.
Of the “2000s-era slideshows” criticised by Seward, examples on the site in the week after the sale included “5 colleges with the best dorms in America” and “The 5 best cities in America for single men”.
Spanfeller said: “My response to this is and always has been that especially online, people read what they want to read… So slideshows or galleries work really, really well on certain situations and less well on others. And so you figure out what that is, and there’s a place for that. And then how do I know there’s a place? Because they get an inordinate amount of engagement when you do them right.”
Most of Quartz’s revenue comes from advertising, although it also still received “meaningful” income from memberships. It ditched its hard paywall in April 2022 after three-and-a-half years, shortly before the G/O Media takeover.
Quartz ‘needed an owner that wanted to fight’
David Kaplan, a co-owner of editorial and content marketing consultancy Brand Newsroom LLC who previously covered digital media and ad tech as a business journalist, told Press Gazette he felt being launched in the era of scale was a real challenge for Quartz.
“Like any business, it needed an owner that wanted to fight and own a specific niche in the marketplace, namely, the ‘global economy.’
“I think Semafor is a worthy successor in a lot of ways by aiming for those high-minded and high-value business leaders/decision-makers who advertisers view as ‘premium’. But as we face the threat of a global economic crisis starting in the US, that model will be sorely tested.
“The bottom line is that the media business is always challenged. But being original, being focused on a clear line of sight, is the only way to win. The thing is, that model doesn’t come cheaply and the margin of success is always razor thin.”
Kaplan said he believes G/O Media “has largely been predicated on the once-viable ability to bring in vast amounts of audience traffic through search and social. They seem stuck in that ‘volume’ business, which emphasises the finally discredited idea of ‘quantity over quality’.”
Kaplan added that “while it’s easy to stereotype private equity as a villain, I think in this case, the stereotype fits.
“Just as earlier G/O acquisitions like Deadspin were steadily dismantled, the support of Quartz’s quality journalism was pulled and it was quickly cut. Star reporters were deemed too pricey. Instead, younger journalists, instead of being nurtured to make their own mark and produce well-written, deeply reported news and features, were essentially forced to churn out content. That was a death knell that finally came.”
Similarly Simon Owens in his media industry newsletter said that “Quartz was a victim of timing. It was launched during the scale era of media – when Facebook was sending gobs of traffic and industry leaders still thought they could convert that traffic into meaningful ad revenue. Then when the traffic era ended, Quartz wasn’t niche enough to operate as a B2B media outlet and didn’t have the resources to compete with the WSJs and Bloombergs of the world.
“Its death knell was its acquisition by G/O Media, a company that never had the patience or the interest in finding a sustainable business model.”
Jim Spanfeller defends private equity ownership
However Spanfeller argued against the narrative that “it’s a PE-driven mercenary killing all these brands. The truth couldn’t be further away than that.”
He added: “I won’t say that I’ve never had a disagreement with Great Hill but for the most part they’ve been very supportive… every brand that we bought is now living and and enduring and publishing.”
He acknowledged that this included several sites that G/O Media closed but have since relaunched: news and opinion site Splinter closed in October 2019 while feminist site Jezebel shut down in November 2023 due to the difficulties of its advertising model. Both were subsequently saved through a sale to Paste Media, which also later bought The AV Club.
Other sites sold by G/O Media include sports site Deadspin which was subject to a blow-up between staff and management over a directive to “stick to sports”. Spanfeller argued: “Writing about three dogs that you met while you’re taking a vacation in Mexico… it doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell the reader that this is a sports site and it certainly doesn’t hold up to an advertiser thinking I want to advertise in a sports environment.” Deadspin was ultimately sold to European sales firm Lineup Publishing in March last year in a deal that saw the entire staff laid off.
G/O Media’s other sales have included Lifehacker to Ziff Davis in 2023, The Onion to a group owned by Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson in April last year, and tech site Gizmodo to European publisher Keleops last June.
G/O Media was formed with the purchase of a raft of digital media brands from Univision in 2019. Spanfeller noted that in the six years since, the industry has contended with the rise of digital media unions, the Covid-19 pandemic, a recession, and major changes to social and search referrals with, most recently, the arrival of Google AI Overviews.
Similarweb data shows worldwide social referrals to Quartz were down 43% year on year in March 2025 to 267,900 following a jump up in 2024.
Seward said that by the time G/O Media bought Quartz, the company “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)”.
But Spanfeller said The Root, which describes itself as putting out “black news and black views”, “had its best year ever last year”.
And he said overall: “Every sale that we’ve done so far has been at a profit.” He said he has told staff in the past: “Profit equals freedom.”
Asked about plans for the two remaining G/O Media properties, gaming site Kotaku and The Root, Spanfeller said: “We don’t comment on M&A activity in any way, shape or form.”
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