You've got to be a pretty informed (and humble) news consumer to read a news piece and then hunt down a separate site to understand it better.ĭavid Leonhardt has at least tried to characterize his audience, though he risks making them all sound like the know-it-all at the bar who likes the sound of his voice too much. Specialist sites have another tricky problem: the people who read them are likely to be the ones who already have a pretty good understanding of the news.

Perhaps standalone sites devoted to explanatory journalism will soon seem equally strange. No-one would launch a news site dedicated to interviews, hosting Miley Cyrus alongside Newt Gingrich and Jonathan Franzen. It's possible those droves might not like Silver's new, broader site – and they could opt for the Times' new venture instead.įar more people are interested in the topics to which data-driven journalism can add than they are in data-driven journalism itself. Here The Upshot may have an advantage: if it sticks to the narrower areas of polling and policy, there's clearly a defined audience for that – as Silver showed when his section of the Times site brought in a huge audience during the 2012 election. Vox has covered porn ( twice), Obamacare, climate change, Ukraine and Edward Snowden.īut neither site truly aims to break news on the areas they cover, and therein lies a problem: are readers meant to visit their favorite 'regular' news sites, then hop by and see if the newcomers have anything to add (or debunk)? Neither FiveThirtyEight nor Vox has offered quite enough (yet) on any of their specialities to become the first stop. Perhaps the trickiest thing for any of the three sites – or any similar projects yet to come: who, exactly, is the audience? People who like being explained to?įiveThirtyEight's topics have varied from polling to sports, equality in movies to toilet-seat covers. View image in fullscreen A recent Vox feature by Dylan Matthews featured interviews with 'a wide array of porn performers' Photograph: Vox Photograph: Vox With so many rival sites hopping up, it's worth thinking about what we actually want the standard fare of our data journalism – or explanatory journalism, if you prefer that more marketable description – to become: should these startups stick to the proven model, or dig out new data? Should they break news or just analyze it? And how much is too much – are we being over-served, under-served, or have we now hit the Goldilocks point? Preaching to whom? Finding numbers nearly as good on drugs, trafficking or even homelessness isn't nearly so easy. But it's fairly standard fare for explanatory journalism: the data's (relatively) easy to get, and not insurmounably hard to explain. (And that was before an epic climate-change fail.)īoth of those sites have since produced some decent pieces of work, along with the occasional dud, and now comes the Times, with a new polling model that is nicely presented, and an accompanying analysis of what's happened to the rich and middle-class that's excellently done. Part of this came from jealousy – Silver and Klein both enjoy, or suffer from, the wünderkind label – but the backlash may have been sparked by faintly hubristic moments at launch: a cringeworthy promotional video at Vox, and a round of interviews by Silver that threw shade at most of the media who might help direct traffic his way. The early reception for FiveThirtyEight and Vox was decidedly less generous. Which is what you might expect from a news organization with the NYT's experience – the team, led by David Leonhardt but including many new outsiders, has established itself well. Day one of The Upshot looks good: it's clean, there's a coherent set of topics, and the data is as beautifully presented.

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