A Trump stock slump

Plus, some personal news about 538 and future plans

Welcome back. It has been a while.

Some news

First, let me address the elephant in the room: Last week, ABC News fired the entirety of the (small) remaining staff at FiveThirtyEight (or 538, as they rebranded it in July 2023), including me. Needless to say this is a huge loss for journalism. The 13 people I worked with were some of the smartest, kindest and most talented journalists I have ever met. Moreover, no newsroom has such a dedication to factfulness in political writing, nor in using complex tools for advanced news analysis while meeting readers where they are.

The void left by 538, frankly, is chasmic. Not only will we not produce new content at the intersection of news and statistical analysis, but ABC News also took down the website powering our archive of interactive journalism, preventing most of us from accessing a big chunk of our historical body of work. 538, at least for now, is dead. You can read individual articles by searching for them on Google, or via the various w…