Six months of Strength In Numbers

An update on the newsletter business and other projects

Hello readers,

This Sunday, I’m skipping the regular data roundup to do something a bit different. I think it’s time to share an update on the business we’re building together here, and for some personal reflections on life post-FiveThirtyEight.

Intro, by way of recap

The big reason I’m writing this now is that, as of last week, it has been exactly six months since ABC News closed 538, forcing me and 15 colleagues onto the sluggish job market for coders and journalists. Frankly, things went poorly for me: I applied to a few dozen tech jobs (AI has really hurt hiring), was headhunted to lead a West Coast data newsroom (they went a different direction — apparently it’s hard to convince people to make a 29-year-old CEO), and a few mainstream newsrooms offered jobs but they were all too slow to hire, not quite right for me, or both.

This quickly led me (back) to Substack. Most of you don’t know this, but I started Strength In Numbers originally in 2017, before I even had my job at The Economi…