This has not been the most relaxing summer for me — lots of Saturday nights spent staring at a spreadsheet, and lots of time on the 2 train shuttling back and forth to Midtown — but you should start to see the fruits of that labor very soon. We are now planning to migrate FiveThirtyEight to NYTimes.com on Tuesday, August 24th. This is roughly a week later than we had originally planned, but our feeling is that we want to be rolling at pretty much full speed from the very outset of our re-launch there, and so we have indulged in a few extra days of development time.
The next update to our Senate model will likely come on launch day, the 24th. The forecasts will be significantly more rich, interactive and navigable than they are now. The plan is then to debut our House and gubernatorial forecasting models within a week or so of launch — tentatively, we have the our first House forecast scheduled for Thursday the 26th, and the first gubernatorial forecast scheduled for Monday the 30th, although these dates are subject to change. The House forecasts in particular are, we think, pretty innovative, and will involve our forecasting the outcome of all 435 individual House races as well as the disposition of the entire body. Updates to the Senate, House and gubernatorial forecasts will then begin to cycle through on a regular basis, with each being updated approximately once a week. (For instance, there might be an update to the House forecast each Thursday.)
We also plan to run a quick update of our pollster ratings before re-launching at the New York Times, likely sometime toward the end of the upcoming week.
To answer several further questions about our move to the Times that I’ve gotten over e-mail:
— All of our current freelance contributors will be migrating to the New York Times along with me.
— The main changes you will notice to the content flow are that I will begin posting more frequently after having been on a somewhat reduced schedule for most of the summer. Also, I will be working out of the New York Times newsroom most days and that may somewhat affect the timing and pacing of posts, with a relatively higher percentage of content to be posted on weekday mornings and afternoons; it is unlikely, on the other hand, that you’ll be seeing as many posts at times like these, at 1 in the morning.
— Although, as of the 24th, the front page of FiveThirtyEight.com will re-direct to NYTimes.com, the archives of this site will remain browsable in their entirety.
— Comments at NYTimes.com will be moderated, which I hope will be a welcome change for 99 percent of you.
— We will retain our current Twitter feed and it will continue to alert you when new articles have been posted.
— We will continue to run posts occasionally on non-politics topics, like sports and science, although these will be relatively infrequent at the outset given the immediacy of the midterm elections.
— As with all content that appears at NYTimes.com, our posts will receive an edit before being published. The most obvious impact of this should be that our copy will be a bit crisper, and that we’ll begin to start referring to people as Mr. John Zogby or Mrs. Michelle Bachmann. This is not to say that our teammates on the edit desk will never raise questions when we come to conclusions that are not adequately supported by the evidence — the Times has high standards, as we do. But the blog should continue to have a strong “voice” and an independent perspective.
— Finally, I have heard some concerns about the New York Times‘s metered model, which it says it will implement at some point after the midterms. I would encourage people who have worries about this to browse the entirety of the comments that the New York Times has made on the public record about the model, which is quite different from the versions used by some other news organizations. For example, in addition to the free allotment of pages, users who come to the site through third-party referrers, like other blogs or social networking platforms, will not trigger the pay wall. With that said, I of course hope that you’ll at least consider subscribing to the New York Times in print, or one if its various e-reader or digital editions. Having gotten an up-close-and-personal view of the newsroom, I can’t emphasize enough how much dedication the New York Times has to its craft, and how much support it provides to its writers in the form of things like editors, photographers, news assistants, its international bureaus, and its exceptional team of graphic and interactive journalists.
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We very much appreciate your patience and your loyalty to this site and hope you will continue to join us as we embark on new adventures at the Times.