Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Disney is cutting 200 positions across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, including shutting down FiveThirtyEight, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night.
From the Journal:
The ABC news magazine shows “20/20” and “Nightline” are consolidating into one unit, resulting in job cuts, the people said. ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site 538, which had about 15 employees.
In 2023, we wrote about the rise and fall of FiveThirtyEight, which had already been operating in diminished form since 2023 when founder Nate Silver left ABC. At that time, FiveThirtyEight had around 35 employees.
FiveThirtyEight — named, of course, after the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college — has its roots in the “Community” section of the liberal news site Daily Kos, where, in 2007, a 29-year-old baseball statistician named Nate Silver began writing posts about the 2008 U.S. presidential election under the username “poblano.” Silver launched FiveThirtyEight as its own blog in March 2008, and in the general election that year, his model correctly predicted the results in 49 out of the 50 states, as well as all 35 winners of the U.S. Senate races. The early, wondering coverage of Silver’s work frequently invoked magic….
The New York Times, announcing its FiveThirtyEight “partnership” in 2010, referred to Silver a “statistical wizard.” FiveThirtyEight quickly became a massive traffic driver for the Times, where his presence provided fodder for then-public editor Margaret Sullivan….
In 2013, Silver left The New York Times (Sullivan wrote about that, too) and took FiveThirtyEight to ESPN. Under parent company Disney, it was transferred from ESPN to ABC News in 2018 as ESPN sought to distance itself from political commentary, and has operated from there since.
When Silver left ABC, he took his models with him and now runs them from his own Substack, Silver Bulletin, which FiveThirtyEight ran its own forecast for the 2024 presidential election under G. Elliott Morris, who’d previously been a data journalist for The Economist. The site has maintained a presidential approval rating tracker (which on Tuesday showed Trump’s approval rating underwater for the first time since he began his second term) and other useful polling averages; it’s unclear what will happen to those when the site shuts down.
“For last year’s election, 538’s publicly-available databases were a major data source for the NYT and other news outlets that reported on the election or crunched the numbers, including Silver Bulletin,” Silver wrote on Wednesday. “Basically, our process was to ingest their data and then make various additions, subtractions, and changes.” He also wrote about the business model for maintaining this type of data:
I think there are really only two options to provide an adequate incentive for the hard work of keeping a comprehensive public polling database:
Either you need to have an upsell — most of the data is free, but premium features and/or models require a subscription; that’s basically what we’re doing.
Or you need to have some sort of not-for-profit structure. If a university or nonpartisan nonprofit out there wants to maintain a consortium of public polls, I’m happy to have those conversations and contribute ideas (and possibly data). Although there are some benefits from duplication — everyone finds some polls that others miss, and everyone has slightly different standards — there are also diminishing returns to this.
As reported, the entire staff of 538 was laid off this morning. This is a severe blow to political data journalism, and I feel for my colleagues. Readers note: As we were instructed not to publish any new content, all planned updates to polls data and averages are canceled indefinitely. Huge loss :(
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) March 5, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Oh geez, I just saw the news about 538. My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 5, 2025
man ABC completely blew it on this. absolute fumble. it feels like it's been the end of an era for most of an era but this is kind of devastating anyway.
— Walter Hickey (@walthickey.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 10:40 PM
FiveThirtyEight was such a wonderful place to work, filled with some of the most supportive, creative, and thoughtful coworkers a person could ask for. Most of us were laid off in 2023, but the remaining staff deserved (and deserve) better.
Vive la Fivey!
— Maggie Koerth (@maggiek.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 11:42 PM
538 closing is a very sad end to a place that was always misunderstood by the companies that owned it. There are lots of smart people there who should be snapped up. Reach out!
— Clare Malone (@ClareMalone) March 5, 2025
ABC News isn't commenting on what will happen to 538's incredibly valuable data and content. A source confirmed that 538 is "winding down" but said ABC "will continue to provide best-in-class polling and political data analysis that it has offered for decades."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 5, 2025
FWIW, we (Silver Bulletin) planned on launching Trump approval ratings this week. There's no change to those plans, though there will be some extra legwork. Like others, we greatly benefited from using 538 as a data source, even as we applied our own model/methods.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) March 5, 2025
The real issue with this is that Split Ticket is still just a site we run in our spare time. A site with FiveThirtyEight’s immense trove of data and content takes a lot of effort, money and time, especially when you consider the graphics they have. https://t.co/572ExplzZd
— Lakshya Jain (@lxeagle17) March 5, 2025
news still unfolding but here is one thing i'll say:
538's data collection was game-changing, and i hope it gets a rebirth. would need a modest budget for 2-3 researchers and 1-2 engineers. AI has also made things easier (at least I suspect — we were forbidden from using it). https://t.co/gGvo5NcAd4
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) March 5, 2025
