Ep. 14 — The ABCs of NFTs and their role in digital journalism and the creator economy / Zach Seward, Co-founder & CEO, Quartz.
Jul 08, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
Over the past seven months, non-fungible tokens or NFTs have captured the world's imagination and hype cycle, especially after the digital artist known as Beeple sold an NFT, which is a blockchain-verified proof of transfer of ownership, for one of his prints, for a record $69 million.
Since then, demand for these types of collectible digital art has exploded. Artists, writers, and entire industries are trying to tap into this lucrative new art form and create all kinds of NFTs for movies, albums, photographs, even a single tweet.
At the forefront of the NFT effort in the digital newsroom is the business publication, Quartz, which sold the first news article converted into a non-fungible token or NFT. Since then, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other news outlets have followed suit with their own NFT offerings.
Joining me to talk about NFTs and the media landscape is Zach Seward. He's co-founder and CEO of Quartz. Seward is widely recognized as a leader in digital journalism, cited in publications, such as Forbes, Crain's New York Business, Digiday, and FOLIO.
Prior to joining Quartz, Seward was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, covering education and health, and then served as the newspaper's first social media editor. Before the Wall Street Journal, Seward was an assistant editor at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, covering the media industry.
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Chitra Ragavan:
Over the past seven months, non-fungible tokens or NFTs have captured the world's imagination and hype cycle, especially after the digital artists known as Beeple sold an NFT, which is a blockchain-verified proof of transfer of ownership for one of his prints for a record $69 million. Since then, demand for these types of collectible digital art has exploded. Artists, writers, and entire industries are trying to tap into this lucrative new art form and create all kinds of NFTs for movies, albums, photographs, even a single tweet.
Chitra Ragavan:
Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is Techtopia. At the forefront of the NFT effort in the digital newsroom is the business publication, Quartz, which sold the first news article converted into a non-fungible token or NFT. Since then, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other news outlets have followed suit with their own NFT offerings. Joining me now to talk about NFTs and the media landscape is Zach Seward. He's co-founder and CEO of Quartz. Seward is widely recognized as a leader in digital journalism, cited in publications, such as Forbes, Crain's New York Business, Digiday and FOLIO. Prior to joining Quartz, Seward was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, covering education and health, and then served as the newspaper's first social media editor. Before the Wall Street Journal, he was an assistant editor at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab covering the media industry. Zach, welcome to Techtopia.
Zach Seward:
Thank you so much for having me.
Chitra Ragavan:
Well, tell me how you made the journey from journalism to digital journalism and over to Quartz and why you got it started.
Zach Seward:
Yeah. I helped start Quartz back in 2012. Before that, as you were just saying, I was at the Wall Street Journal. My boss there was this guy Kevin Delaney, who was the managing editor of WSJ.com. He gets hired away by Atlantic Media in the very beginning of 2012 to launch a new business news site for Atlantic Media. That company then published the Atlantic Magazine, a few other titles. They had this theory, which proved correct, that there was some white space for a digital-only global business news publication that would go after advertising that was largely locked up with the Financial Times and the Economist, which by dint of that, not being a very competitive market. It gotten complacent and certainly had the burden of having to focus on print.
Zach Seward:
And so, we came in, digital-only, totally free,
