Why I’m Joining Quartz, In One Handy Chart

Starting this Friday, I’ll be the new Tech Editor for Quartz, an excellent, newish business news site from Atlantic Media.

Why? Here’s the quick version:

A little more on that middle part about City Notes, the mobile startup I’ve been working on with my friend Mark Dorison. We’ve spent this year designing and building a new app that we think you’re really going to like — we’ll show you more when it’s ready. It’s the kind of thing that I hope we’ll still be working on many years from now, with a strong business, brand, and team. For now, I’ll be putting my evenings and weekends into it, with the plan that it will eventually become my day job. Why not raise a bunch of VC money and go nuts? We might do that, someday — but we’re waiting for the right time and the right partners.

What about this site, SplatF? If you’ve been here since the beginning, I started SplatF almost three years ago as an experiment in self-publishing. I’ve learned a lot! For a while, there, I was even making a real run at it. And I’ve loved seeing others flourish on their own: John Gruber’s always-sold-out Daring Fireball sponsorship now costs $9,500 a week — when I started this site, it was $5,500.

But three years doing the Stay-At-Home Brooklyn Writer Thing was enough for now: I’m actually really, legitimately excited to be in an office again, getting dressed before noon, having a bunch of interesting coworkers, and working on things with other people. There’s a real market gap in what I’d call “interesting tech stories that actually matter” and chasing that sounds a lot more fun — to me, at least — than selling podcast sponsorships. More soon.