EDITING HIGHLIGHTS

  • "A Tale Of Two Suburbs" by Clare Malone
    • A blend of on-the-ground reporting, data analysis and memoir, Clare's piece was the platonic ideal of a FiveThirtyEight article. Take a theme that's bubbling just under the surface of American life -- the ongoing partisan split among white voters along class lines -- look at the evidence for what's really happening, and do the reporting that complicates the conventional wisdom on the topic.
  • "When Women Run" by FiveThirtyEight staff
    • ​FiveThirtyEight's staff spent months tracking down 97 women who have run for office, including at least one person from every state, to discuss what it was like to be a woman trying to get elected. We turned those interviews into a kind of audio-driven oral history, highlighting the best quotes for the site, and repackaging the project as a standalone podcast. In all, there were 11 pieces to the broader package, including a news-making interview with Stacey Abrams, who said she thinks she'll be president by 2040.
  • "What Went Wrong In Flint"​ -- by Anna Maria Barry-Jester
    • Anna, our public health correspondent, spent weeks in Flint at the height of the lead crisis to report on how public officials misused data to create a tragedy, and the people who were left in its wake. This is another example of how data and evidence-driven analysis, mixed with character-driven reporting, can produce definitive work.
  • "The Complicated Legacy Of A Panda Who Was Really Good At Sex" by Maggie Koerth
    • Maggie spun some magic with this one. Narrative journalists talk a lot about "mules" or "donkeys" that carry a reader through a story. In this case, Maggie used a panda. ​A quarter of living pandas trace their lineage to Pan Pan, the titular panda. Maggie used his story as a way to talk about animal conservation more broadly, and the result is a piece that makes you think differently about how we keep our most vulnerable animals alive.
  • "Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. Take One That Isn’t." by Maggie Koerth and Julia Wolfe
    • ​More than a million readers took this personality quiz, an interactive tour of how scientists really use personality as a metric in their work. It's way better than Myers-Briggs.
  • ​"Science Isn't Broken" by Christie Aschwanden
    • ​For the past decade or so, scientists have been sweating whether or not their work is truly sound, since some hallmark studies have been unable to be reproduced. But Christie argued that science isn't broken. Instead, failure is a part of the scientific method. To discover work that is not reproducible shows that science is working. A blend of reporting, analysis and interactivity, this piece found a huge audience that went way beyond the usual science niche. 
  • ​"Joe Biden’s Greatest Strength Is His Greatest Vulnerability" by Clare Malone
    • Clare followed the former vice president around for weeks to deliver this political profile of the biggest question surrounding Biden in the fall of 2019: Black voters loved him, but his opponents kept saying he was weak on issues black voters care about. Clare did what great political journalists do -- highlighted a contradiction within the electorate, without going too far in extrapolating what it might mean. 
  • "You’ll Never Know Which Candidate Is Electable" by Maggie Koerth
    • For months we've been hearing about electability from friends, the candidates and the media. Maggie cut through all the bloviating to report on whether electability is a real idea in the hearts of voters. Political scientists and voters say yes, some people are more electable. But divining who is is impossible, so we should all stop trying. 
  • "A Plagiarism Scandal Is Unfolding In The Crossword World" by Oliver Roeder
    • Ollie, who carved out a surprisingly popular niche writing about games, got a tip that big-time crosswords were being plagiarized from the New York Times. He reported the hell out of it, running data analysis to show just how similar the crosswords were, and confronting the man behind the plagiarism. The puzzler was later fired from USA Today.
  • "Where Democrats And Republicans Live In Your City" by Rachael Dottle
    • We know that our country is polarized, but cities are supposed to be blue islands. Rachael, one of FiveThirtyEight's visual journalists, used data visualization to show how that narrative isn't quite right. Cities aren't just their urban cores, and as you expand your definition of a city beyond downtown, you start to see that nearly all cities have Republican enclaves. And some cities are more politically segregated than others.