An archived website of FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism publication known for its polling analysis and election models, is now redirecting readers to ABC News, its owner and former host. As a result, many thousands of articles stretching back to FiveThirtyEight’s founding in 2008 are no longer accessible online, according to Nathaniel Rakich, a former senior staff editor at the publication.
ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight, which was founded by the election analyst and forecaster Nate Silver and specialized in data-driven analyses of elections, sports and other subjects, in March 2025. But an earlier stand-alone version of the publication, fivethirtyeight.com — discontinued in 2023, when FiveThirtyEight merged with ABCNews.com — had been archived and remained accessible online.
It is not clear why or precisely when the content was removed, though comments about a lack of access began appearing online on Friday morning. ABC News declined multiple requests for comment.
A vast majority of fivethirtyeight.com is no longer available; users who attempt to navigate to the site are now redirected to the political news page of ABC News. The only portion of the old site that still appeared to be accessible on Saturday was data.fivethirtyeight.com, which is meant to offer access to the data and code underlying the publication’s work. Many of the relevant links, however, were redirecting users to ABC News.
Mr. Rakich, who oversaw editorial operations at FiveThirtyEight, is now the managing editor at Votebeat, a nonprofit that covers voting access and election integrity. He was one of the first people to flag the issue on social media, posting late on Friday morning about the “needless erasure of thousands of pages of knowledge.” Around 700 of his own articles were among the lost work, he said Friday.
Mr. Silver, who left FiveThirtyEight in 2023, taking his hugely influential polling model with him, said that he first noticed something was amiss on Thursday night, when he was attempting to link to previous coverage from FiveThirtyEight.
The link he was trying to insert appeared to be “totally broken,” Mr. Silver, who now edits the Silver Bulletin, a newsletter about political polling, sports and other topics, said in a phone interview.
The following day, Mr. Silver replied to Mr. Rakich’s post with one of his own, in which he lashed out at ABC News. Mr. Silver said that he had recently tried to purchase the intellectual property rights for FiveThirtyEight, but that ABC had rebuffed him.
Like Mr. Rakich and other former FiveThirtyEight employees, Mr. Silver was not entirely surprised that fivethirtyeight.com had seemingly been taken offline, given that the publication had shut down last year. But he was very sorry, he said, to see it go.
“All the work that’s been done, you know, groundbreaking work covering this remarkable period in American politics, is lost,” he said, adding: “It’s really depressing.”
Mr. Rakich said in a text message on Friday that Mr. Silver had likely lost access to approximately 3,500 articles he had written.
Mr. Silver founded FiveThirtyEight, sometimes rendered as 538, as a polling aggregation and analysis blog in 2008. The site became significantly more popular after it successfully predicted Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election that year. In June 2010, FiveThirtyEight was folded into The New York Times as part of a three-year licensing deal. (The Times maintains a FiveThirtyEight archive, though it is not prominently accessible via nytimes.com.)
In 2013, ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight, and ABC News bought it in 2018. Both ESPN and ABC are now owned by the Walt Disney Company.
G. Elliott Morris, who took over as head of FiveThirtyEight after Mr. Silver left and who now writes a Substack newsletter, Strength in Numbers, said in an interview that he and some of his colleagues had expended a lot of “internal political capital” to convince ABC to archive fivethirtyeight.com.
Mr. Morris called it a “foolish business decision” on ABC’s part to remove the cache of original FiveThirtyEight content at a time when digital media is in serious decline. Its disappearance, he said, was “gutting” for the journalists who had worked there.
One of them, the podcast host Galen Druke, said that he had lost access — through a combination of fivethirtyeight.com’s recent disappearance and the publication’s formal shutdown last year — to several interactive projects he had contributed to over the years and that he was incredibly proud of, including deep dives into gerrymandering, gun violence and women in politics. Some of that work had inspired a university course and had been integrated into a syllabus.
FiveThirtyEight, Mr. Druke said in an interview, had built a legacy of data visualization and powerful interactive articles, one that had changed news media.
But now, he said, the erasure of the archive had left “a lot of hard-working journalists that don’t have anything to link to when it comes to their portfolio.”
The post Thousands of FiveThirtyEight Articles Seemingly Vanish From the Internet appeared first on New York Times.
