After the exit of FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver as part of job cuts at The Walt Disney Company, ABC News has hired his replacement.
The Economist’s G. Elliott Morris will begin leading the brand on Monday, June 26th, according to a report from Deadline.
Morris claimed that FiveThirtyEight “has a really strong brand, not just with election wonks but the wider media ecosystem. It’s been around for 15 years. It’s what inspired me, in part, to be a data journalist, and I expect the core mission to stay basically the same.”
He will likely need to rebuild the site from the ground up. Earlier reporting claimed that Silver, not ABC News, owned the election models that made the site popular.
Additionally, FiveThirtyEight was decimated by the staffing cuts from Disney. Silver estimated that two-thirds of the group’s employees were slashed.
The report from Deadline added that ABC News will continue using the FiveThirtyEight brand after considering a rebrand after Silver’s departure.
The author of the book Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them, Morris wrote a weekly column for The Economist.
