![]() News professionals have devoted countless hours on what makes something popular, and while there are no simple answers, a commonality for us has been that many of these stories have addressed aspects of identity: where we come from, what we eat, how we talk, for example. For the site’s fifth birthday today, the Times pulled together its big-hit Upshots on a single page, highlighting both the team’s favorites and the most-read: In recent years, The Upshot has taught us about the difference between the Twitter Democrat electorate and the real Democrat electorate, the extent of racism for black boys, how your community relates to others in the U.S., the godforsaken election night needle, your opposite job (reporters’ are physicists), and much more. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie ‘Moneyball’ disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics…A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work.” As then-public editor Margaret Sullivan put it, “I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. Less than a year later, the wonky, data-viz-filled subsite The Upshot reinjected some of the formats and techniques of the academic, policy, and political blogging worlds into the Times - with perhaps a more Times-friendly voice. But the departure of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight franchise (first to ESPN, then to ABC News) left a hole where the regular application of statistical modeling to topics of news interest had been. Okay, so it was a little more complicated than that.
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