Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The New York Times announced today that it would begin hosting FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s stat-wonkery site that shot to fame dissecting poll data during the 2008 election. Henry Farrell comments:

Newspapers have traditionally been highly allergic to statistics, charts and the like, in the belief that they turned readers off. FiveThirtyEight has demonstrated that there is a sort-of-mass readership for this kind of material, if it is presented in the right way. That the New York Times has bought the site — and is seeking to integrate Silver into its broader operations — suggests that it wants to tap into that market.

Hmmm. I guess “sort-of-mass” covers a lot of territory, but I have my doubts that the readership for heavy duty number crunching is any bigger than it’s ever been. Instead, I’d guess that “presented in the right way” is really the operative phrase here. And that doesn’t so much refer to the way Nate displays his results (though he does a very good job of it), but the fact that he’s pretty clearly a liberal partisan. I don’t mean that in the sense that he distorts his results to favor a liberal point of view — as far as I can tell, he doesn’t — just that he’s very good at addressing the topics that liberal readers are most interested in hearing about.

To a certain extent I think this is the future of political journalism. Readers of political reporting pretty clearly prefer a point of view, but in its more rarefied precincts that doesn’t mean they want the obvious agit-prop of a Fox News or conservative talk radio. They want their facts more or less straight, which is what Nate provides, but they don’t want to wade through thousands of words of junk to find the bits and pieces they’re interested in. Rather, they want a guide who already knows what’s important to them and puts it front and center. That’s what FiveThirty-Eight.com provides. The fact that it’s all number-centric is secondary.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate