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Ben Welsh made an index of all FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

66 points by ChocMontePy 3 hours ago | 16 comments

defrost 2 hours ago

For any, like myself, wondering "Who is Ben Welsh" ?

  Hello. My name is Ben Welsh. I'm an Iowan living in New York City.

  I am a reporter, an editor and a computer programmer. My job is to use those skills, together, to find and tell stories.

  I work at Reuters, the world's largest multimedia news provider, where I founded the organization's News Applications Desk. In that role, I lead the development of dashboards, databases and automated systems that benefit clients, inform readers, empower reporters and serve the public interest.

  [...]

~ https://palewi.re/who-is-ben-welsh/

simonw 17 minutes ago

Ben is one of my favorite people in the world of data journalism. He's the author of many excellent training courses in the field, including:

- https://github.com/palewire/first-python-notebook

- https://github.com/palewire/first-web-scraper

- https://github.com/palewire/first-graphics-app

yogorenapan 2 hours ago

Can't believe Ben Welsh is not Welsh, and FiveThirtyEight has nothing to do with Wales

nomilk 2 hours ago

Couldn't figure out why archiving FTE aricles matters, but a quick search yields:

> Thousands of FiveThirtyEight articles seemingly vanish from the internet

https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/thousands-of-five...

And discussions here on hn:

ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553

Disney erased FiveThirtyEight (article by Nate himself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703

arlattimore 20 minutes ago

I'm not a soccer guy, but I still think the piece on Lionel Messi was awesome

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701122958/http://fivethirty...

nl 2 hours ago

This is because whoever owns Fivethirtyeight now (ABC?) deleted the whole archive of articles on the site.

bombcar 51 minutes ago

Don't we need more than an index of Archive.org because whomever controls the domain could robots.txt these out of existence if they wanted to?

Avicebron 2 hours ago

Bourdieu. The field has structure, the structure has logics, the logics shape what counts as a publishable story, a promotable journalist, a credible source, a "balanced framing".

tantalor 60 minutes ago

Please, say that again in comprehensible English.

Avicebron 55 minutes ago

The ownership relationship was always load-bearing? The journalism in this case was a tenant, I highly recommend that people promote forms of independent journalism?

EDIT: dude have you heard of the s in https, http://johntantalo.com gets flagged.

internet2000 43 minutes ago

I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?

patcon 33 minutes ago

I think it's the fivethirtyeight of of historical significance, and Disney is one of the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet. So it's just kinda like "whoa, this is stratospheric negligence" or "whoa, what is the reason for this... assuming they are not idiots?"

ChocMontePy 3 hours ago

Github link:

https://github.com/palewire/fivethirtyeightindex.com

ChrisArchitect 54 minutes ago

Love Ben but title can simply be: Index of FiveThirtyEight articles preserved by the Internet Archive

3eb7988a1663 48 minutes ago

If I wanted to get the complete WARC archive of 538 - how do you do this in a friendly way? No interest in history tracking, just want the last available version from Internet Archive.

stinkbeetle 12 minutes ago

Those 2015-16 ones sure aged poorly, I'm reminded of this https://i.imgur.com/6Z9QQj3.jpeg

This is why people don't really buy the "but he had Trump at 30%, you just don't understand statistics" apologist line. Sure he hedged in the dying days of the campaign (a cynic might think to try to protect his credibility), but the tone overall was of a person who comprehensively failed to understand the mood of the country from beginning to end.

Which is a problem because these election predictions are not just pure "mathematical models" and "data driven" like 538 would have had you believe. What mathematical model should be used? What data should and should not be used? At some point those things are based on the modeller's understanding of reality.