We Won Some Prizes

We’re very excited to share some news: FiveThirtyEight has been named the Data Journalism Website of the Year for 2016 by the Global Editors Network, a Paris-based organization that promotes innovation in newsrooms around the world. In our world of sports statistics, polling data and empirical reporting, it’s a very nice honor.

We also won the 2016 award for News Data App of the Year (large newsroom) for “Swing the Election,” an interactive project by Aaron Bycoffe and David Wasserman. (Make sure you check it out.)

The Data Journalism Awards, which were started by the editors group in 2012 as a way to honor the best in a new, growing form of storytelling, attracted 471 entries this year from newspapers, magazines and websites around the world. There was a lot of strong competition: Among the news organizations submitting entries this year were the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Die Zeit Online and Le Monde.

Buzzfeed, ProPublica and Quartz also picked up big awards at a ceremony held on Thursday in Vienna, Austria.

The president of the jury that made the awards is Paul Steiger, executive chairman of ProPublica. The awards are sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the Google News Lab.

The judges had nice things to say about the range of our articles and data-visualization projects, and even about our willingness to admit mistakes. “There were many great data journalism sites last year but FiveThirtyEight led the pack,” they wrote.

Two of our entries were finalists in other categories: Investigation of the Year (large newsroom) for Oliver Roeder’s article on a plagiarism scandal in the crossword puzzle world, and Best Use of Data in a Breaking News Story, for our coverage of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, which included stories by Ben Morris, Harry Enten and Oliver Roeder.

FiveThirtyEight, which was founded in 2008 by Nate Silver and acquired by ESPN in 2013, is part of an increasingly popular category of journalism around the world, as the other winners in the competition showed. They ranged from the Panama Papers consortium to a revealing look at hidden government records by La Nación in Argentina.

Here is a list of the articles that we submitted as our entry for the website of the year award:

1. How Baltimore’s young men are boxed in (feature)
2. The death of Justice Antonin Scalia
   • How Scalia became the most influential conservative justice since the New Deal
   • Scalia was almost never the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court
   • Obama won’t be able to replace Scalia with a justice as liberal as Sotomayor
   • A 4-4 Supreme Court could be good for unions and voting rights advocates
3. Should prison sentences be based on crimes that haven’t yet been committed? (long-form feature)
4. What went wrong in Flint (long-form feature)
5. A plagiarism scandal is unfolding in the crossword world (long-form feature)
6. Forecasts for the 2016 presidential primaries (interactive graphic)
7. Uber’s impact on New York City
   • Uber is taking millions of Manhattan rides away from taxis
   • Uber is serving New York’s outer boroughs better than taxis are
   • Is Uber making New York City’s rush hour worse?
8. Science isn’t broken; it’s just harder than it looks (long-form feature and interactive graphic)
9. The complete history of the NFL (interactive graphic)
10. Beware of ticket sellers who review movies. (feature)