Data guru Nate Silver to leave ABC

Dominick Mastrangelo
·2 min read
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Data journalist and political prognosticator Nate Silver will soon leave ABC and the popular FiveThirtyEight blog he created.

Silver wrote in an internal message to employees of the website that he expects to leave the company when his deal with ABC is up.

“Unfortunately the day we’ve been worried about has arrived,” Silver wrote to his staff, according to the Hollywood Reporter, alluding to a recent round of financial hardships and layoffs that have impacted ABC and its parent company. “We don’t yet know the scope of these layoffs, exactly who is impacted, or the terms under which they are departing, but it is going to be a hard day for all of us.”

In a statement to The Hill on Tuesday, an ABC spokesperson said the company “remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting – this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond.”

More coverage of the week’s media moves from The Hill:

“We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism,” the spokesperson said.

Silver, who founded FiveThirtyEight in the early 2000s, sold the blog initially to Disney’s ESPN before it was acquired by its sister company ABC News in 2018.

“Disney layoffs have substantially impacted FiveThirtyEight. I am sad and disappointed to a degree that’s kind of hard to express right now,” Silver wrote in a tweet on Tuesday. “We’ve been at Disney almost 10 years. My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it.”

Silver gave no indication about his future post FiveThirtyEight but said he had “been worried about an outcome like this and so have had some great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere.”

Updated at 1:30 p.m.

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