Five Thirty Eight, the political data site set up by Nate Silver in 2008, is being shut down by its owner, Disney/ABC.
“It's a very somber scene in the building—people crying and upset,” a network staffer told Status News’ Oliver Darcy. “Lots of panicked phone calls between staffers trying to make sense of it.”
….
“It’s a massacre,” an ABC News employee told Darcy, while another staffer compared the dire situation at the network to the dystopian Netflix series Squid Game.
“You just feel like you've made it to level seven of 'Squid Games' at this point if you've survived,” the employees stated. “I've actually thought of this a lot," the person said. "I don't know if you have watched 'Squid Game,' but they put you in teams and they pit you against each other. And then they just watch and it's brutal. And then even the people who win the prize in the end ... they're so unhappy. That is literally network TV.”
Silver wasn’t part of the job massacre. He left the site in 2023.
Thus ends a site launched in 2008 by Nate Silver, best known for its near-perfect prediction of Barack Obama’s victory in that year’s presidential election. (The site was correct in 49 of 50 states and nailed every senate race that year.)
Silver took FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times in 2010. The site, which also included sports content, moved over to ESPN in 2013 and then was moved under ABC News in 2018. Silver left his role as the top editor in 2023.
Having been through a huge newsroom layoff myself once, I know exactly how they feel.
Other changes were also made by Disney/ABC:
Meanwhile, the news about FiveThirtyEight wasn’t the only notable part of ABC News’ cuts.
The news magazine shows “Nightline” and “20/20” are being moved into one unit, meaning more job cuts. In addition, according to Flint’s story in the Journal, “all three hours of ‘Good Morning America’ branded shows will be consolidated under one person; previously, the third hour had a separate production team.”
Here is some of Nate Silver's take on Disney’s decision:
But the basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough “product” people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself. It’s always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
