The Upshot is a website published by The New York Times which spreads articles combining data visualization with conventional journalistic analysis of news. [1]
The Upshot was first announced in March 2014 and was officially launched on April 22, 2014. [1] [2] Steve Duenes, a graphics director at the New York Times, won a newsroom contest by coming up with the name "The Upshot". [3] The site started with fifteen full-time staff, including founding editor David Leonhardt. Because The Upshot was launched soon after Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight left the Times, it was widely described as a planned replacement for FiveThirtyEight and Silver. [1] [4] However, Leonhardt stated in an April 2014 interview that The Upshot was not intended to replace Silver. [5] In 2014, The Upshot produced two of the twenty most-read stories on the Times' website, and it was responsible for 5% of the paper's web traffic in October of that year. [3] [6] Also in 2014, the site was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award in the category "Online Commentary, Large Newsroom", but it lost to NPR's Code Switch. [7] In 2016, Amanda Cox, who had been a founding member of The Upshot, replaced Leonhardt as its editor. [8]