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On Tuesday March 4th, President Trump was about an hour into his big address to Congress when I started getting text messages: “Are you ok?”
I was kinda tired, a little bored and not necessarily looking forward to recording a late-night podcast reacting to the address, but yeah I was fine. And then the follow up: “Have you seen the Wall Street Journal article?”
Initially I hadn’t, but the article read, “About 200 employees are being let go at Disney’s ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks unit, people familiar with the matter said.” It continued, “ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site 538, which had about 15 employees.” After nine years of making the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast it appeared my job was coming to an end.
While the manner in which the news broke was surprising, if I’m being honest, the content of it was not altogether shocking. Inside of ABC, the first part of 2025 had felt like a layoffs waiting game and the FiveThirtyEight site had already been winnowed considerably. Either way, what should I do with the news?
I was sitting in my living room, watching the address with our then-producer on the podcast Cameron Chertavian and we were planning on recording a podcast with FiveThirtyEighters Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe. Had they seen the news? Should we still even record a podcast if our jobs were over? If we did record an episode what should we say?
In the end, we mostly stuck to the task at hand, assessing the address we’d just watched. Though, again, to be honest, I’d basically stopped paying attention halfway through. I obliquely mentioned the news about FiveThirtyEight shutting down at the top.
The next morning we got the official word, along with the word that all FiveThirtyEight editorial content would cease publishing immediately. That meant no farewell podcast or post on the site. That also means that there’s an alternate universe podcast episode still out there, one in which Nathaniel, Mary and I properly took the opportunity to put the podcast and the site to bed. This is that podcast.
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