Goodbye FiveThirtyEight

By
in Press

tagged journalism, rip

Back in April 2023, I was in Brooklyn to attend a live taping of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. It was great, someone corrected Nate Silver on the U.S. constitution and former FiveThirtyEight writer Clare Malone returned for a lot of great banter backed by data.

The very next week, Disney laid off two-thirds of the staff, including Silver, and merged the website into the primary ABC News one. I have yet to ever attend another in-person podcast taping.

So it wasn't really a surprise that Disney finally killed FiveThirtyEight last week. But it's a sad time.

Nate Silver (left) and Galen Druke (right) discuss whether the New York Post headline was a "good use of polling" or not at a live podcast taping in April 2023. (It was bad.)

FiveThirtyEight really popularized and built up modern data journalism. The 2020 presidential election forecast was a fantastic case study of how to represent both probabilities and uncertainty. Its pollster ratings actually graded pollsters, and helped drive discussion on changing methodologies.

This is not to mention all of the fantastic work they did on sports predictions and statistics.

I'm particularly nostalgic about FiveThirtyEight since its peak was around the same time I started studying journalism. The "Significant Digits" newsletter was my mandatory morning reading and of course, I'd share the new statistics I just learned with whoever would listen.

Likewise, I'd listen to the weekly politics podcast within an hour or two of it being released to hear the latest "good use of polling or not" debate and polling details about the next election. Even though I stopped listening two years ago, it's still my #1 most listened to podcast at 354 hours (#2 is at 90 hours). My favorite series, "The Gerrymandering Project", was a deep, data-driven analysis of redistricting and gerrymandering. It's still worth a listen today.

Since being let go, Silver has criticized Disney for failing to monetize the site properly, which I agree with. There was no way to financially support them aside from buying merch, which I assume brought in basically nothing.

FiveThirtyEight was originally just Silver's blog, before it was bought by The New York Times (and then later sold to Disney/ESPN). It was just one of the many free web blogs the Times had, but if it were today, I could easily see them selling it as a separate subscription, like The Athletic or Wirecutter. Just ahead of its time unfortunately.

Some of the work FiveThirtyEight did has since been taken over by others, like The Upshot, Split Ticket, Harry Enten's Margins of Error, etc., but I have yet to find a similar data-focused media outlet to replace the void.