FiveThirtyEight is shutting down as part of broader cuts at ABC and Disney
Disney is eliminating 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. 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 disapproval ratings exceeding his approval ratings 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.
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
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
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