The popular political poll news and analysis website, 538, is being shut down as part of a broader shuttering effort across ABC News and Disney Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday night.
Disney is reportedly cutting 200 positions across ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, including shutting down the data-driven 538.
The ABC news magazine shows 20/20 and Nightline are to be consolidated into one program, resulting in further job cuts, sources told the Journal. The closing of 538 means an additional 15 employees will be let go.
Other changes include all three hours of Good Morning America branded shows being combined into a single production team, and Disney Entertainment Networks unit, which hosts broadcast networks and cable channels such as Freeform and FX, will see staffing reductions in program scheduling and planning.
A source told the Journal that the layoffs represent just under 6% of the combined staff at ABC News and Disney Entertainment and will be announced to employees as early as Wednesday.
FiveThirtyEight, which is named after the number of electors in the US electoral college, has become a popular website for predictions, analysis and watching the polls in the months and days leading up to election night.
But the website’s workforce had been slowly dwindling for a couple of years. The 15 employees still with the outlet make up less than half of the team from 2023, when it had about 35 employees.
The decline began when 538’s founder, Nate Silver, left the company two years ago when his Disney contract expired.
In a post on X, Silver expressed his disappointment with the website closing down, writing: “My heart goes out to the people there. They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”
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Maggie Koerth, a science journalist formerly with 538, expressed similar sentiments in a Bluesky post. “FiveThirtyEight was such a wonderful place to work, filled with some of the most supportive, creative, and thoughtful coworkers a person could ask for,” she wrote.
“Most of us were laid off in 2023, but the remaining staff deserved (and deserve) better,” she added.
The broader media landscape has been hit with mass layoffs seemingly nonstop for months. Last month, MSNBC announced a massive shakeup at the network that included letting go of Joy Reid and her production team, as well as no longer using the Spanish-language network Telemundo.
