Digiday has learned that Quartz plans to shut down the Quartz Brief, the chatbot-style mobile app launched to great acclaim in 2016. Adam Pasick, who headed up editorial operations for the app, as well as the Quartz Daily Brief, one of Quartz's flagship newsletters, left for a job at The New York Times in May. A spokesperson said Pasick's departure had no bearing on the decision to shut down the app. The Brief, which earned the adoration of media watchers but never managed to grow a large-scale audience, is being shut down at a moment when Quartz is devoting more resources to driving consumer revenues; Quartz launched a membership product in November, which costs $14.99 per month or $150 per year, as well as a new mobile app modeled after NewsPicks, the mobile news app owned by Uzabase, the Japanese firm that acquired Quartz in July. "As we prioritize some exciting changes ahead for the main Quartz app and Qz.com, the Quartz Brief app will shut down on July 1," a Quartz spokesperson wrote in an email. Originally built around a chatbot-influenced user experience, Quartz Brief served users a mixture of stories published by Quartz and third parties such as The Washington Post, summarized with a mixture of text and gifs. Since the beginning of 2017, the Quartz Brief app has been downloaded 1.3 million times across both iOS and Google Play, according to Apptopia data, with monthly downloads trending downward over that time. A Quartz spokesperson said the number of active users of the new app is "On par" with the number of active users of the Quartz brief, without sharing a specific number. Read more