At first it seemed like an accident. I might not have paid much attention if a particular quotation hadn’t stuck in my head. It was a snippet of the sort that Peter Coy appends to his twice-a-week newsletter for The New York Times. In his book Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? Carnegie Corporation’s John Gardner had written, in 1961:
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
Hence the story in Quartz Daily Brief about the new United Parcel Service’s contract startled me. An annual salary of $170,00 in pay and benefits for UPS veterans is more than what the associate professors of my acquaintance are making. I knew that UPS contract negotiations had gone down to the wire but had read very little elsewhere about the settlement. No wonder online searches for UPS jobs doubled in the following few days. UPS, with its distinctive brown panel trucks and their uniformed drivers, is an American institution, on a par just below that of the likewise uniformed US Postal Service. My interest in labor matters quickened when Quartz wrote up a United Auto Workers strike vote authorization bid the next week.
Quartz is among the most successful of the many digital news organizations that have entered the business in the last decade or so. ProPublica, Vox, and Axios, are others, trailed by many other sites of more specialized natures. The New York Times made headlines when it disbanded its sports desk in favor of absorbing into its operations an assemblage of talented sportswriters it acquired when it purchased the digital publication The Athletic, for $550 million last year.
I recently have been switching my magazine-reading habits to digital – The Economist, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement and Science. Is isn’t easy squaring my desires as a reader with publishers’ needs to satisfy advertisers; the tables of contents I prized in their hard copies seldom exist in their online editions. The Quartz story got me thinking about the place of purely digital start-ups in the rapidly changing firmament of news.
In Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts (Simon & Schuster, 2019), former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson adopted the approach that David Halberstam took in his 1979 classic, The Powers That Be. Halberstam elaborated in his subtitle: “Within the kingdom of media, how Luce’s Time, Paley’s CBS, the Grahams’ Washington Post, and the Chandlers’ Los Angeles Times had become rich and powerful and changed forever the shape of American politics and society.” It turned out to be less than forever. Forty years later. Time is the property of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who publishes it every two weeks; CBS is part of Paramount Global; The Washington Post belongs to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; and billionaire biotech investor Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the Los Angeles Times.
So, for her subjects, the warier Abramson chose NYTimes and WPost, and two newcomers, digital starts-up, BuzzFeed and Vice. But change was accelerating. The value of Sullivan’s book where the NYTimes and the WPost are concerned is still under-appreciated, but BuzzFeed and Vice have already wound up on the scrapheap. As Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information, a Silicon Valley technology publication, told the Financial Times last year, “it is still incredibly difficult to build a news organization. It isn’t a business for the faint of heart.”
Quartz was founded in 2011 by Wall Street Journal online veterans Kevin Delaney and Zachary Seward, as part of Atlantic Media. Conceived as an international news service focused on business news, designed to serve readers on notebooks and cellphones. It opened for business the next year, and with the rest of the tumultuous publishing industry, went through a series of phases, chasing page-views via Facebook, being acquired by a Japanese media company, buying itself back and installing a paywall, before being acquired once again, this time by G/O Media, proprietor of what was left of The Gawker and The Onion.
With small bureaus all over the world, and editions published on several continents, Quartz competes directly for news with the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg News, and, to a lesser extent, with the New York Times and The Washington Post. It is, for the most part, a highly unequal competition. But these legacy publishers all have their handicaps, stemming from commitments to newsprint editions. Bloomberg, like Reuters, is a financial data firm with a news service attached. The Quartz newsroom is the sole digital native among these, and that may confer certain advantages.
If you believe, as does Economic Principals, in the logic of alternating long cycles of political sentiment, then it seems all but indisputable that we are living through a second global Glided Age. EP thought back to Halberstam, and his four pillars of opinion-shaping stability in an ostensibly unchanging world, each of them associated with particular individuals. EP suspects that UPS contract was a development of historic significance. If so, Quartz got the scoop. All is in flux, but given its strong leadership, Quartz is the digital news organization that EP expects to grow.