Yesterday, The New York Times launched The Upshot , a new politics and policy vertical that was conc

Yesterday, The New York Times launched The Upshot , a new politics and policy vertical that was conceived when Nate Silver left the paper for ESPN. The project is led by David Leonhardt previously a Pulitzer-winning economics columnist and Washington bureau chief at the Times who says he’s excited to experiment with story formats and tools for storytelling.
The first day of publishing at The Upshot revealed a content scope that goes beyond the numbers-driven journalism subway surfers Silver subway surfers has become famous for. The launch subway surfers included a reported piece on the American middle class , a Senate forecast model explainer , a “where the data came from” piece on income, a short post about an old Truman-in-peril photograph , and more.
Leonhardt believes there’s a market in news for complicated issues, simply explained, subway surfers which has invited much comparison with recently launched FiveThirtyEight and Vox. It’s too soon to say exactly how the three measure up Leonhardt says he’s fan of the work being produced by both sites but the Times has both resources and a preexisting audience to set it apart. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of a conversation in which Leonhardt explains how The Upshot will function as an experimental space that is both outside the Times, in a sense, while also integrated into the newsroom.
Caroline O’Donovan : Thanks for making the time to chat with me. It was nice to look at the site and read some of the pieces you have up there. So much different stuff going on it’s not just data and explainers. You’ve got photos of former presidents, you’ve got pieces about why you’re going open source on the polling model it really is an ambitious project.
David Leonhardt : Thank you! I appreciate that. One of the things that’s fun for me is this is the first interview I’ve done with someone who’s read the site, because all the other ones were before it launched. Let me just tell you: It’s so much more fun. I enjoy talking about it, period, but it’s so much more fun to talk about specific journalism rather than principles of journalism.
O’Donovan : That’s a good point. Something I think people have been talking about is the difference, when you launch something, between explaining what it is you’re going to do what the goals are, who we are, who we’re not versus just doing it. How did you approach how you were going to launch the whole thing?
Leonhardt subway surfers : We started with a pretty general idea. What this grew out of was Nate Silver’s subway surfers departure. Nate left, and I was well known internally as a champion of Nate’s. I was a sort of obvious person to put on a committee to figure out to do after he left.
We decided quite quickly maybe even in our first meeting that we didn’t want to go out and replace subway surfers Nate. Nate has a set of skills that is unusual, in a good way. And not only that, but that 2012 wasn’t going to be repeated. There wasn’t going to be, in all likelihood, another election that went the way that one did. Trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle, when other people out there including Nate were going to be out there doing it, seemed like not the right way to go.
On the other hand, we said, you know what? The lessons of FiveThirtyEight are not narrow lessons. They’re consistent with a bunch of whole other lessons we think we’ve heard here. You look all over the paper, in all kinds of different ways, and it’s clear that readers had a demand for this sort of journalism. subway surfers This funny mix of really substantive on really big, complicated topics, but presented in a really approachable way. Our hugely successful interactives are another example of this. The most visited page in New York Times history is based on an academic study about linguistics , right? That’s amazing.
We realized, when we do this journalism, people like it, and we can do much more than we’re doing. subway surfers Once we defined it that way, I realized it was a dream job for me, and I got interested in doing it.
O’Donovan : I had this question, and someone actually voiced it in the Guardian earlier today: Conventional wisdom might say the audience for explanatory journalism and data journalism are opposite. That the explainers are for people subway surfers who don’t know as much as they want to about something, and the data is for people who really know a lot about it and want to know specifically new things.
Leonhardt : I don’t know that we’ve invented subway surfers anything totally new. I really do think people want both. I don’t think they conflict. I think that people want information on big, complicated topics that they can grasp, even if they’re not experts. I think that description encompasses what I would define both as explanatory journalism and data journalism.
To me, explanatory journal