Jasmine Mithani, visual journalist at FiveThirtyEight, on the Fivey Fox mascot, their interactive swing state map, and more →

“The Michigan Daily exposed a cluster tied to fraternities and sororities just days before the county imposed a stay-at-home order on University of Michigan undergraduates. The State Press broke news that Arizona State students who were supposed to be in isolation had left their dorms. And at Indiana University, The Indiana Daily Student spoke to Uber drivers who picked up students from Greek houses under quarantine orders.”

“This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit. They now face serious existential questions.”

“The media and its gatekeepers have managed to make themselves a central story in the 2020 presidential election … This is especially true on cable news, where mentions of terms like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ have skyrocketed in the past few weeks, surpassing mentions of issues voters typically say they care about like social security, climate change, and immigration.” —SS

Even Fox News. (“This is an extremely flammable situation and the President just threw a match on it,” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace noted. “He hasn’t won these states.”) —SS

“Print outlets, including the AP, have generally been more sedate about the results than their TV counterparts. Early headlines atop the homepages of the New York Times and the Washington Post centered high expected turnout, and the simple fact that vote counting was ongoing.”

The company, which owns more than 260 daily publications and hundreds of weeklies, reported a net loss of $31.3 million in the third quarter. Gannett hopes that the 31.1% increase in paid digital subscriptions can offset its declining print business.

One of the interviews was with executive editor Dean Baquet. “I don’t feel hyper competitive about making election calls,” Baquet said. “I feel the need to be cautious.”

“What upsets me most as a journalist is that even after a seemingly endless, four-year parade of articles about how Trump supporters still support Trump, we continue to lack anything like an accurate, widely agreed-upon consensus about what motivates them … Journalists need to stop buying transparently bogus explanations for why people support Trump and figure out what’s really going on. This requires a different – actually, more empathetic, and certainly more time-consuming – kind of interviewing style. It means taking a more sociological approach, asking about formative moments, about cultural background and value systems, about education, and, perhaps most importantly, about media diets.”