Dem
47
GOP
53
It had been a dead man walking for at least a year or two, largely kept alive by the fact that 2024 was a presidential election year. However, as of yesterday, FiveThirtyEight is no more, having been shuttered as part of a broader cost-cutting effort across the Disney/ABC empire.
From the beginning, the business model didn't make a lot of sense. From the Disney/ABC side, FiveThirtyEight was initially attached to ESPN, with the idea that the site would do a lot of sports analysis. Maybe that idea sounds good on paper, especially since site founder Nate Silver first made his bones doing baseball-related number-crunching for Baseball Prospectus. However, FiveThirtyEight's actual brand, of course, was politics. There are a lot of sports fans who don't want to read about politics, especially when they are "escaping" to the world of sports. There are also a lot of sports fans who really dislike the idea of sports being reduced to numbers and spreadsheets and nerds. Over the course of about a decade, FiveThirtyEight got branded and re-branded, and moved and re-moved, half a dozen times. By the end, it was a sub-page of ABCNews.com, and wasn't that easy to find, even if you were looking for it.
From the FiveThirtyEight/Nate Silver side, things didn't make a lot of sense, either. They were trying to produce analysis that requires real effort and real legwork, but on a daily schedule. As a result, a lot of their product was somewhat flimsy, and not well thought-out, or well-explained. There was also a push to be lighthearted or fun. Sometimes that worked out OK, like the "America's best burrito" bracket. Sometimes, it produced head-scratching pieces, like "The Five Types of Tom Hanks Movies."
In any event, it was a slow, but fairly steady, decline. The original pool of talent, recruited when the site was flush with Disney cash, largely fled within a couple of years. Harry Enten, who was one of the numbers guys, jumped to CNN. Walt Hickey, who was the culture guy, jumped to several publications, and then started a Substack. Mona Chalabi, a data journalist poached from The Guardian, went back to The Guardian. And so forth. Thereafter, the staff was slowly whittled down, and there were years' worth of rumors that the site would only survive until the end of the next presidential cycle. Silver left a couple of years ago, and by the time of the final shutdown yesterday, FiveThirtyEight was down to 15 employees, from a peak of more than 50.
Although the work product wasn't especially substantive by the end, FiveThirtyEight was better at aggregating polling data than any other site. It will be a shame to lose that, but it would seem that's not enough to cover the salaries of 15 people. Certainly, no other outlet has rushed in and tried to "adopt" the team and/or the brand. Oh well, you know what they say about "all good things..." Anyhow, a tip of the hat to a pioneer in the field of online psephology. (Z)