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| The New York Times Upshot | |
|---|---|
| Name | The New York Times Upshot |
| Type | News and analysis |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founder | David Leonhardt; Amanda Cox |
| Owner | The New York Times Company |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Language | English |
The New York Times Upshot The New York Times Upshot is a journalism section launched in 2014 that combines reporting, analysis, and data visualization to illuminate public affairs and policy debates. It was created within The New York Times Company by journalists and editors with backgrounds at outlets and institutions such as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, and academic centers like Harvard Kennedy School and Columbia University. The Upshot quickly positioned itself alongside long-form and multimedia projects from organizations including ProPublica, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and Vox.
The Upshot was announced in 2014 during a period of organizational change at The New York Times Company that followed earlier innovations by entities like The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Slate Group, NPR, and BBC News. Founding editors drew on quantitative storytelling precedents from outfits such as The Economist, Financial Times, FiveThirtyEight, The Pew Research Center, and academics at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early hires included data journalists and graphic designers with prior experience at Walt Disney Company–owned outlets and nonprofit labs like Knight Foundation grantees. The Upshot expanded its staff and scope during the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, covering elections, health policy, and urban issues alongside collaborative projects with institutions like National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Upshot emphasizes explanatory reporting that situates stories about figures such as Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama within quantitative frameworks used by scholars at Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, and Columbia University. Its formats include interactive graphics, prognostic models, and policy explainers echoing styles from The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly. The section often uses contributions from journalists with prior tenures at The Washington Post and collaborations with think tanks like Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Regular features probe topics ranging from demographics and census trends to market behavior and election forecasting, similar to reporting by AP, Bloomberg News, Politico, and Axios.
Notable Upshot projects include election analyses during cycles involving 2016 United States presidential election, 2020 United States presidential election, and midterm contests, where reporting intersected with data from Federal Election Commission, Cook Political Report, and polling aggregates used by FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics. The Upshot produced in-depth coverage of healthcare debates tied to Affordable Care Act implementation, with analyses referencing studies from Kaiser Family Foundation and RAND Corporation. It also published investigations into urban housing linked to policies in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, paralleling reporting by ProPublica and The Marshall Project. Interactive explainers examined topics such as tax reform under Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Supreme Court decisions involving Roe v. Wade and later cases, and pandemic-era coverage connected to COVID-19 pandemic developments reported by World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Upshot is known for combining datasets, statistical models, and visualization techniques akin to methods used at FiveThirtyEight, Pew Research Center, and academic labs at MIT Media Lab and Harvard Data Science Initiative. Staffers have used programming tools and platforms originating from communities around R (programming language), Python (programming language), D3.js, and open-source projects promoted at conferences like Strata Data Conference and PyCon. Methodologically, the section has incorporated polling synthesis, regression analysis, and simulation methods common in research at University of Michigan, University of California, Berkeley, and London School of Economics. Data sources frequently cited include federal agencies such as Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Census Bureau, and international repositories like World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The Upshot received attention from peers including editorial teams at The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and academic commentators at Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter Institute. Its interactive models influenced how outlets such as Vox, Quartz, and FiveThirtyEight present polling and policy trade-offs, and its visual storytelling has been cited in curricula at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and workshops hosted by Knight Foundation. Awards and nominations have come from organizations such as Online News Association and Society for News Design for excellence in visualization and explanatory reporting.
Critics from commentators at National Review, The Federalist, Commentary, and columnists associated with Fox News and Breitbart News have challenged Upshot analyses on polling interpretation and model uncertainty, echoing disputes similar to those involving FiveThirtyEight and The New Yorker over predictive journalism. Academics at Stanford University and Harvard University have debated methodological choices in high-profile pieces, while media critics at Columbia Journalism Review and Nieman Lab scrutinized presentation of probabilistic forecasts during contested elections. Some controversies centered on the framing of socio-economic research involving institutions like Urban Institute and questions about interactive design first raised in critiques published by The Marshall Project and ProPublica.
Category:American news websites