#Financial website Quartz may have been sold for $1, sources say

When Quartz co-founder and CEO Zach Seward announced on Sunday that had he purchased his struggling news site from its corporate owners, the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

But sources tell The Post that Tokyo-based Uzabase, the financial media and information firm that bought Quartz from Atlantic Media in July 2018, were looking to sell it for a pittance.

Deal terms offered in the weeks leading up to Sunday sale to Seward, sources said, called for potential new owners to pay just $1 for the struggling financial news website. Uzabase was also offering a $6 million personal loan to the company.

In addition to Seward, the new ownership includes Quartz’s editor-in-chief Katherine Bell, who joined in December from Barron’s and who declined to comment on how much Quartz cost.

“We’re not commenting on the terms of the deal,” Bell said in an interview with Media Ink Tuesday. But, she said, the company is definitively on the prowl for money in the form of new investors.

“We will be seeking further financing,” Bell said. “We will be fundraising.”

Uzabase bought Quartz from Atlantic Media for $86 million with a plan to wean it off ad revenue by adding a paywall and growing its subscribers. But the transition has caused financial pain with Uzabase in its last earnings report saying Quartz lost $11.2 million in the first half of 2020, ending in June on revenue of only $5 million.

The financial news website, which charges $99 a year, landed 21,000 paying customers in the first half of 2020. But it has also continued to offer advertising supported free content — a model that’s suffered greatly this year due to the pandemic.

“We’ve always had a unique perspective,” said Bell, who says Quartz offers unique coverage of topics ranging from climate change to inequality in the work world. She said the current staff is around 110 people, down from 250 a year ago.

“We want to help readers make a difference through their work, not just by doing business well, but doing business to make a difference in the world,” Bell said.