Quartz’s web output appears concentrated in one AI-assisted byline

Quartz’s website news output appears to be dominated by Cris Tolomia, a byline that produced at least 52 articles on Oct. 8, or roughly 20,000 words in a day, according to a Press Gazette review. The articles ranged across dog breeds, energy, AI drug research, stock markets and cybersecurity, and almost every news item on the Quartz homepage at the time carried Tolomia’s name. The review found that the stories appeared largely AI-generated, sometimes with human input in their opening paragraphs. It said Tolomia appeared to use AI for rapid rewrites of other outlets’ reporting and, in some cases, whole features. Quartz and its owner, Redbrick, did not respond to the publication’s questions about the workflow. Quartz’s own disclaimer says AI is central to how it reports, produces and publishes news. It says the tools may draft, structure and edit copy, make supporting images or manage entire publishing workflows, with human editorial oversight from Quartz journalists. MadeByHumans assessed three articles. It rated an article on US inflation expectations and a feature on technology predictions from 30 years ago as 100% AI-generated. An article about Google and Unity launching an AI video-game platform was rated 85.2% AI-generated, suggesting some AI-assisted human input. Tolomia has published thousands of Quartz articles, but the profile carries no photograph, biography or email contact method. MuckRack listed about 9,200 articles under the byline, mostly from Quartz or syndications on Yahoo and MSN. Based on available records, Tolomia appears to have had no published journalism before March 2026. The concentration follows a previous, publicly acknowledged Quartz experiment under its former owner. TechCrunch reported in January 2025 that Quartz had begun by publishing simple AI-generated earnings reports, then expanded into roughly 400-word news articles under the Quartz Intelligence Newsroom byline. The report counted 18 such articles on Jan. 27, including one aggregating reports on the Jeju Air crash investigation. G/O Media described that AI newsroom as “purely experimental” and said editorial staff reviewed every story before publication. It nonetheless identified quality-control problems in a Quartz article based on its own account-deletion instructions. Futurism later reported that, after Redbrick bought Quartz from G/O Media in April 2025, every editorial employee except the editor-in-chief and executive editor was fired as part of the transaction. Redbrick bought Quartz with plans to integrate it into the newsletter-monetisation platform Paved. Quartz had claimed more than one million newsletter subscribers at the time, while its website drew about 1.8 million visitors in September, roughly a tenth of its 2020 traffic, according to Similarweb. The publication, founded in 2012 for business readers in the global economy, once employed more than 200 people and reported in 115 countries and 19 languages. It has changed hands four times in recent years, including G/O Media’s purchase for less than $10 million in 2022. Quartz has continued to invest in newsletters and podcasts, including a six-part investigative podcast about AI.