ABC News redirected all FiveThirtyEight article URLs to abcnews.com/politics, permanently erasing thousands of data-journalism pages.
Key Takeaways
All FiveThirtyEight URLs now redirect to abcnews.com/politics with no archive or redirect to original content.
Nathaniel Rakich (formerly of 538) called it “a needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.”
The shutdown eliminates a large public corpus of data-driven political, sports, and science journalism built over 15+ years.
GitHub repos at github.com/fivethirtyeight remain online but may also be at risk.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters confirmed Nate Silver attempted to buy back the FiveThirtyEight IP and was refused – ABC cited his public criticism of their management as the reason.
The business failure is attributed to a cyclical revenue problem: traffic and ad interest peaked only in presidential election years, making it hard to justify to corporate bean counters in off-years.
Consensus is that ABC mismanaged a recognizable, high-value brand with a desirable professional audience, while former 538 staff (Silver, Galen Druke, others) have rebuilt audiences independently on Substack.
Notable Comments
@culi: Flags specific interactive pieces – gun deaths viz, p-hacking explainer, gut microbiome explainer – as major losses; urges archiving the GitHub org now.
@madrox: ABC exec circa 2008 told staff “the internet is a fad” – offered as institutional-culture context for the shutdown decision.
