Updated
Updated · The New York Times · May 16
ABC News Redirects FiveThirtyEight Archive, Erasing Thousands of Articles Since 2008
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · May 16

ABC News Redirects FiveThirtyEight Archive, Erasing Thousands of Articles Since 2008

2 articles · Updated · The New York Times · May 16
  • Thousands of FiveThirtyEight stories became inaccessible this week after the archived fivethirtyeight.com began redirecting readers to ABC News’ politics page.
  • ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight in March 2025, but its stand-alone site had remained online after a 2023 merger into ABCNews.com, preserving articles dating back to the outlet’s 2008 founding.
  • Nathaniel Rakich, a former senior editor, said a vast majority of the archive disappeared and that about 700 of his own articles were among the lost work.
  • Data.fivethirtyeight.com was still partly reachable on Saturday, though many links there also redirected, and ABC News declined repeated requests to explain when or why access was removed.
Is our digital history becoming collateral damage in the escalating war between publishers and AI companies?
When a corporation acquires a news outlet, do they have a moral duty to preserve its journalistic legacy?