It Makes Sense for Some People to Subscribe to AOL
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
All that being said the format has left a lot to be desired. My criticism unfairly is less about this article (though I found it to look largely like an ad with very little substance... in fact legitimizing some of the offerings as being valuable services is somewhat dangerous).
I love the in depth statistical analysis of sports and popular and culture. It's a really cool space. Pop culture and sports daily blogs also are very popular. The problem is that producing high quality versions of the former in the latter format has proven to be a very difficult exercise. The articles come off as shallow and border on slideshow/buzzfeed/BleacherReport type content.
I hope they figure it out. But despite the great roster it hasn't cracked my must reads.
Did I just hijack this?
It also irks me a bit that one of the guiding principles in Nate Silver's manifesto was that they would not chase the news, but would take their time to provide different insights than other outlets. Instead, it feels like they're constantly chasing the story of the day or yesterday.
Finally, a disappointing number of articles feel half-finished. As if one of their staff writers had an idea, ran with it for a while, then got tired and stopped at their first set of results. Sometimes I take that as a challenge and go scrounge up more data to try and pull together what else is going on, but most of the time I just end up not caring.
They still have a handful of lengthy and interesting pieces, but they're rare enough that I only check the site maybe once a week. Conversely, I check Grantland 10+ times a day, because their writers are engaging whether it's basketball stats or pop culture junk.
When the pressure is to get something out every week (or more frequent) then sometimes you will have to use one of those bad ideas.
We tried to come up with something weekly and it took a TON of time (trial and error). We ended up abandoning our little blog after moderate success due to the time demands of getting quality content regularly.
It's kinda funny. I have the exact opposite reaction to Grantland. They take a tremendous amount of time and effort on long form pieces but lack any statistical or data compelling pieces. I would rather Grantland do what FiveThirtyEight does (well written quick hit posts) and FivethirtyEight do what Grantland does (well researched long form infrequent posts).
It's all backwards.
Rany was one of the baseball prospectus guys, and Barnwell ran with football ousiders, both groups that developed a bunch of the advanced stats used in the sports now. It's not always the most advanced stuff, but they certainly bring compelling data to the table (Barnwell in particular), they just don't hit you over the head with it as it tends to be more embedded in the text rather than presented in a graph (except Goldsberry, he's a graphical dude by profession/professorship).
I mostly follow Basketball pretty well. Zach does a great job.