There’s always a bigger (and often dumber) fish
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a blog-and-politics-aggregator junky. I read politics the way my colleague David Sommerstein reads his Yankees’ box scores.
And every once in a while, one of my favorite niche sites goes big-time. It’s sort of like seeing your favorite indy band hit the Top 40.
Two cases in point are Fivethirtyeight.com and Pollster.com. Both are/were independent, focused, stripped-down sources of great alternative information about political issues and the competitive climate.
Over the last few election cycles, they exploded, becoming a couple of the most visited websites for people interested in this stuff.
Both were gobbled up recently, with Fivethirtyeight going to the New York Times and Pollster devoured by Huffingtonpost.
The cool thing about this is that the people producing all this thoughtful information are rewarded, given a nice pot of money and a regular paycheck for their work.
So I don’t begrudge the owners of either of these sites for selling (out).
But the uncool thing is when the new owners tinker with their new toy to the point of destroying it. That’s exactly what has happened with Pollster.com.
The new site, under the aegis of political impresario Arianna Huffington, has lots of analysis and essays — stuff I could easily find elsewhere.
But the actual polls have largely vanished, absorbed into the chaos of Huffingtonpost’s celebrinews and liberal hand-wringing.
This reaction from Huffingtonpost’s comment section is pretty typical:
Sadly, I must echo many of the critical comments. As a fan of the old pollster.com, I find the clutter factor of Huffpost overwhelming and the antiFox bias issues discrediting and intellectually lazy.
Previously, when I visited Huffpost it was sort of like reading a People magazine at the dentist’s office. I guess now I need to wade through “nearly-naked pictures” of Courtney Love to check out polling data.
I hope the pollster folks made a healthy chunk of change from this transition. You certainly provided a quality service.
The good news is that Fivethirtyeight.com seems to have moved in the opposite direction, using its new resources under the Times umbrella to improve its product and look a little, while mostly doing what they got big doing.
Tags: politics
If all horse race polls vanished, it would not only be no loss to the public discourse but would probably improve it greatly by maybe allowing some discussion of issues. For example, look at how many blog entries (tons) here focused on the “horse race” aspect of the Owens-Doheny-Hoffman race and how many have focused on their positions on actual issues (hardly any). And NCPR is the BEST that’s out there.
” I read politics the way my colleague David Sommerstein reads his Yankees’ box scores.”
Well I’m not keen on your (and the media in general’s) insanely disproportionate fetish with horse race polls but even so, I’d say you have much better taste than any Yankees’ fan! =)