Welcome to Quartz

This is UI madness, things hides, moves and pop around with no obvious relation with my input.<p>The main news timeline is promising though, but greatly needs visual codes for differentiating and qualifying content.<p>It's great to focus on the content while not putting technology asides, but your publishing tool is also of strategical importance. It's great to have rethought the general way of showing information, but this is, to me, clearly half baked.<p>Comparing that with your submission title (for whatever it means, it evokes technology), makes me think you have a problem here.

The future of news has nothing to do with code. That's just "when all you have is a hammer" talk. We're already trending towards Facebook-ized/Twitter-ized news, and I don't think anyone is impressed. The problem with the news is content, and the people, and I don't think technology is going to help with either.<p>As an aside, I just bought a subscription to Bloomberg Businessweek on my iPad (first newspaper subscription ever) and I have to say I'm impressed. Quality long-form writing, covering business and Wall Street without the conservative slant of fellatious tone of the WSJ. Very recommended.

I hope it's not written in the same code these guys are using!<p>OK, that was a bit snarky, but this site's design definitely feels too "clever" and, weirdly, looks like something that might have escaped from a time tunnel to 2006. Since then, everyone has got into the whole minimalism thing, and web design has generally been better for it.

<i>We publish bracingly creative and intelligent journalism with a broad worldview</i><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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. </i><p>I hope the writing in their articles is more straightforward.

Reading a manifesto is probably not a good introduction to the site — it's a bit "tell" instead of "show".<p>Submitted to news.ycombinator about ten hours ago, the qz.com "Check your US tax rate for 2012-and every year since 1913" might show a little bit more of the kind of interactive blah responsive blah storytelling multifluidic blah they aim to do: <a href="http://qz.com/37639/check-your-us-tax-rate-for-2012-and-every-year-since-1913/" rel="nofollow">http://qz.com/37639/check-your-us-tax-rate-for-2012-and-ever...</a>

I'm failing to see what all the fuss is about regarding the UI on this site. It's relatively minimalistic, easy to navigate, and the header condensing to a smaller version was slightly unexpected but I wouldn't call it "jarring" or a deal-breaker by any means. Someone mentioned that Mashable has a great UI and I'm going to have to strongly disagree. Mashable's UI is horribly cluttered and much harder to decipher, while I had no problem whatsoever navigating and understanding the Quartz site.<p>I did notice, however, that the header will drop back down when choosing another link or scrolling back up to the top of an article regardless of whether it's the top of the scroll area. This seems more like a bug than anything, not something intentional to the UI.

The future of news certainly is not UI code. Code is definitely important for reporting, but much more so for analysis and much less so for delivery. If the NY Times (or anyone else) uses code to crunch through millions of records and finds an important story out of it, I will read that story in whatever format they publish in. If it's not some whiz bang "tablet optimized" CMS, I don't care at all. If I am readying your tablet optimized news site and you don't have the important stories, I will stop reading.<p>tl;dr it's the content, stupid.

I think the UI needs a lot of work. When I think of the future of news, I think of something like Mashable's latest UI (which I personally think is quite beautiful).<p>One comment - when I look at the top bar (side note: the automatic slide is jarring and unnatural IMO), I see titles like "Low Interest Rates". That makes me think of spam/advertisements.<p>Another one: "The Next Crisis"? Again, makes me think of spam.<p>I honestly just don't know what I'm looking at on this site. However, I think with some work, this could be interesting.

I think better examples might be:<p><a href="http://usatoday.com" rel="nofollow">http://usatoday.com</a><p>and<p><a href="http://app.ft.com" rel="nofollow">http://app.ft.com</a>

An overreaching, irrelevant slogan title that says nothing. I'd assumed I'd be taken to an interesting article, not a page of links to About Us type info.

I hope that the future UI of articles online is not scroll based; not on computers and especially not on mobile devices. I much prefer the "several pages of columns of text" layout, where I can swipe left/right or up/down to read the previous/next pages. That way, I don't get completely lost when scrolling.

I think a lot of the criticism in these comments is overblown. If anything, I would expect more constructive criticism and feedback from fellow HNers.<p>Quartz is a fairly new site with a small dev team. The site has had some kinks, but it is slowly coming together, and I think it has a lot of potential.

The bar of different categories is really confusing but I appreciate the idea behind this.

Does not work with Javascript disabled. Temporarily allow qz.com, still broken. Lots of overly generic and/or suspicious tracking domains blocked. Tab closed.

I've seen and read about Quartz and qz.com so many times... I still don't <i>really</i> know what they are or what they're for.

am I the only person who gets a loading icon and no content? (Chrome 23.0.1271.97 m)

Nope: the future of news will be written in plain text.<p>Code might help it get some data, evaluate them, present them in addition to the gist of the story.<p>But without the plain text, and without emphasis on the plain text, it's not news: it's a lightshow.