In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a blog-and-politics-aggregator junky.\u00a0\u00a0 I read politics the way my colleague David Sommerstein reads his Yankees’ box scores.<\/p>\n
And every once in a while, one of my favorite niche sites goes big-time.\u00a0 It’s sort of like seeing your favorite indy band hit the Top 40.<\/p>\n
Two cases in point are Fivethirtyeight.com<\/a> and Pollster.com<\/a>.\u00a0 Both are\/were independent, focused, stripped-down sources of great alternative information about political issues and the competitive climate.<\/p>\n Over the last few election cycles, they exploded, becoming a couple of the most visited websites for people interested in this stuff.<\/p>\n Both were gobbled up recently, with Fivethirtyeight going to the New York Times and Pollster devoured by Huffingtonpost.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So I don’t begrudge the owners of either of these sites for selling (out).<\/p>\n But the uncool thing is when the new owners tinker with their new toy to the point of destroying it.\u00a0 That’s exactly what has happened with Pollster.com.<\/p>\n The new site, under the aegis of political impresario Arianna Huffington, has lots of analysis and essays — stuff I could easily find elsewhere.<\/p>\n But the actual polls have largely vanished, absorbed into the chaos of Huffingtonpost’s celebrinews and liberal hand-wringing.<\/p>\n This reaction from Huffingtonpost’s comment section is pretty typical:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I hope the pollster folks made a healthy chunk of change from this transition. You certainly provided a quality service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a blog-and-politics-aggregator junky.\u00a0\u00a0 I read politics the way my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}