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Oct. 26, 2016, 1:53 p.m.
Business Models

Quartz on Wednesday launched its first non-English product, a Spanish-language version of its daily Daily Brief email newsletter that target readers in Latin America and Spanish speakers in the United States.

“The first global moves we made were Quartz India and Quartz Africa, both of them in English. We thought about the big markets we could get to in other languages,” Quartz senior editor Gideon Lichfield said. “Spanish seemed the most interesting.” Latin America isn’t homogenous, he pointed out, but “there isn’t really a regional news publication for the leading businesspeople of the kind we are interested in, so it seemed obvious to appeal to those people.”

The Spanish email, La Agenda, contains a mix of original coverage and bits that are translated from Quartz’s English-language Daily Brief newsletter, which has about 250,000 subscribers. Versions of the Daily Brief are sent out in the morning in the United States, Asia, and Europe. La Agenda will be sent out in the mornings U.S. time. La Agenda’s launch was first reported by CNN’s Brian Stelter.

Quartz has hired a freelance writer and editor to produce the email, Lichfield said. Many of the overarching global stories that Quartz covers in its primary newsletter will be translated into Spanish, and when the Daily Brief links to another news organization’s coverage, the translated version in La Agenda will link to a Spanish-language site that’s covering the same story. Most of the original writing in the newsletter will focus on news in Latin America.

For now, there’s no advertising in La Agenda. Quartz wants to build up the newsletter’s readership before trying to monetize it.

There are more than 500 million Spanish speakers worldwide, including more than 37 million people who speak Spanish and live in the United States. A number of American outlets are trying to capitalize on that growing market. Earlier this year, The New York Times launched NYT en Español, a standalone Spanish site with a staff based out of Mexico City. BuzzFeed has also created outposts in Mexico, Spain, and Brazil along with a New York-based team that publishes in Spanish.

“We don’t have the resources of those kinds of places,” Lichfield said. “The Daily Brief has been very successful for us. The people who read it like it a lot and are very loyal to us. The idea of the email newsletter as a standalone publication rather than an appendage to the website hasn’t taken off as much in Spanish, so it seemed like something we could do well, that would have an audience similar to the one we have in English.”

Lichfield said Quartz doesn’t currently have “specific plans” to expand Spanish-language coverage beyond the current newsletter or to publish in other languages or markets. In January, Quartz publisher Jay Lauf told me that the site, which is owned by Atlantic Media, is looking at a few areas for possible growth.

We’ll continue to focus on our India and Africa efforts. We’ll continue to see some expansion of the journalism in Asia, maybe Australia, maybe even places on the Continent in Europe, Germany is an example. I don’t think we’ll launch another vertical edition this year.

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