ABC Shuts Down FiveThirtyEight, and Pulls the Plug on Its Website

Thursday, 6 March 2025

Oliver Darcy, reporting at Status (paywalled, alas), on the sudden demise of FiveThirtyEight:

On Wednesday morning, shortly after sending an all-staff memo announcing layoffs at ABC News, network president Almin Karamehmedovic joined a virtual meeting with the FiveThirtyEight team. The 15 staffers at the political analysis site owned by ABC News had learned the previous evening — via a Wall Street Journal report — that they were being let go. Now, they were hearing it from Karamehmedovic himself.

But Karamehmedovic, like other managers carrying out mass layoffs at ABC News that day, had little to say about it. I’m told he appeared to be reading from a script as he delivered the devastating news. He offered no explanation for why the Disney-owned network had decided to shutter FiveThirtyEight, which it acquired in 2018 along with data whiz and then-editor Nate Silver. He took no questions. He simply thanked the employees for their work, told them a human resources staffer would follow up, and ended the meeting. The entire affair, I’m told, lasted about 15 minutes. Soon after, employees had their access to ABC News’ systems shut off and the FiveThirtyEight website was pulled offline. Just like that, it was over.

Business is business, and layoffs and closures are never anything but traumatic. But there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. And one of the wrong ways is having the staff find out they’re all fired by reading it from The Wall Street Journal. This guy Karamehmedovic sounds like a real Grade-A dickhead.

And what is the deal with these companies that just unceremoniously pull the plug on websites when they close them? Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a website serving a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted. It’s ABC’s business if they want to close FiveThirtyEight as an ongoing concern, but the years of work deserves to remain online, both out of respect for the people who made it and for the audience that might still want to refer to it. Disney didn’t burn the movies from now-closed subsidiary studios like Touchstone Pictures.

There’s a vast gulf between the old world of print and the new world of online publishing. The difference is profound, but largely overlooked, because it’s human nature to just adapt to the nature of different forms of media and quickly accept current media forms as “normal”. With print, issues were largely ephemeral to the audience. You’d get a newspaper every day, and magazines every week or month, and you’d throw them out after you’d finished reading them. If you wanted to look back at what the paper had published about something a year, a month, or even just a few days ago, you were out of luck, in terms of being able to just look it up on the spot. Librarians did the yeoman’s work of archiving newspapers and magazines to microfilm, so nothing was truly gone or forgotten, but it was an enormous hassle to access microfilm archives. You pretty much had to know the dates of the issues you wanted to see, and you had to do the “searching” with your eyeballs, page by page. The ability of anyone, today, to just instantly access week-, month-, year-, and even decades-old stories is a breathtaking advantage of web publications. And for the last 15 years or so, we’ve had the ability to do this from little machines we all carry in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s truly remarkable.

But the standard behavior when closing a web publication is to just pull the plug. When the whole company goes under, that’s one thing. But when there’s a parent company, especially a thriving one, there’s no justification for pulling the plug other than spiteful disregard for the work. From the perspective of a company the size of Disney, it would cost veritable pennies to keep FiveThirtyEight’s website around forever. What a disgrace.