Tag: Marie Donoghue

Earlier this year, Ryan Glasspiegel of The Big Lead reported that ESPN was “exploring its options to sell or otherwise divest from” FiveThirtyEight, the Nate Silver-led data-driven politics, sports and culture site they bought in 2013 and launched in March 2014. Our new home is ABC News! We're super excited to work with @ABC and combine our strengths with theirs as we tackle the 2018 and 2020 elections and other news stories. Nate Silver and his brilliant FiveThirtyEight team are joining ABC News from ESPN. And much of FiveThirtyEight’s coverage, especially when it comes to politics, seems like a better fit under that umbrella anyway; Goldston’s memo mentions that FiveThirtyEight worked with ABC News during the 2014 and 2016 elections, and this seems like a logical time to make that move; it’s well in advance of the 2018 midterm elections, and that will let the site be established under its new umbrella before that coverage really ramps up. The extent to which anything like Get Up or SC6 actually covers politics isn’t the point; it’s that those shows have been perceived as “political,” and that’s part of why ESPN went away from SC6. However, this is also notable as part of a larger strategy shift at ESPN. All in all, this is probably a move that makes some sense for everyone. Sending it over to ABC News means that the site stays within Disney, that it can work more closely with existing news teams on politics coverage, and that ESPN can disassociate itself from that side while still working with or picking up FiveThirtyEight’s sports coverage. But this is a further indication of how ESPN’s changed since 2014, and another part of the old ESPN that’s going away.