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.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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