“The Upshot” is the New York Times’ replacement for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight by John McDuling.
From the post:
“The Upshot.” That’s the name the New York Times is giving to its new data-driven venture, focused on politics, policy and economic analysis and designed to fill the void left by Nate Silver, the one-man traffic machine whose statistical approach to political reporting was a massive success.
David Leonhardt, the Times’ former Washington bureau chief, who is in charge of The Upshot, told Quartz that the new venture will have a dedicated staff of 15, including three full-time graphic journalists, and is on track for a launch this spring. “The idea behind the name is, we are trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational way,” Leonhardt says. “Obviously, we will be using data a lot to do that, not because data is some secret code, but because it’s a particularly effective way, when used in moderate doses, of explaining reality to people.”
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The New York Times’ own public editor admitted that Silver, a onetime baseball stats geek, never really fit into the paper’s culture, and that “a number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work.” But Leonhardt says being part of the Times is an “enormous advantage” for The Upshot. “The Times is in an extremely strong position digitally. We are going to be very much a Times product. Having said that, we are not going to do stuff the same way the Times does.” The tone, he said, will be more like having “a journalist sitting next to you, or sending you an email.”
I really like the New York Times for its long tradition of excellence in news gathering. Couple that with technologies to connect its staff’s collective insights with the dots and it would be a formidable enterprise.