For my critique, I took a look at a piece from FiveThirtyEight, one of the leading sites for data and polls. The piece in question is entitled “Nuking The Filibuster May Hurt Republicans In The Long Run”, which was written by FiveThirtyEight’s founder Nate Silver. In the article, Silver examines the recent action undertaken by Senate Republicans to get rid of the filibuster in nomination debates in order to confirm Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Silver believes that this decision will negatively affect Republicans in the future, despite their current joy at confirming a SCOTUS nominee. I think the audience for this particular type of story is people who are already interested in politics and read a lot about it already and people who are interested but want to learn more about a specific issue.
To support his claim, Silver looks to the past. He brings up statistics that shows that Republicans have utilized the filibuster much more often than Senate Democrats, particularly in major moments like nuking the public option for the Affordable Care Act. A lot of these points are made by linking out to different articles on the subject from the text of the piece. On one hand, I like that Silver is willing to support the work of other outlets rather than make every reference link back to 538’s own work. However, I think this is a cumbersome way of providing extra information, regardless of how good it is. By my count, Silver links out 24 times with only 4 of those links going to FiveThirtyEight URLs. While it is nice to give the reader additional resources if they want them, I think you’re expecting a lot of a reader to click 24 individual links and read all of the works that follow. In that regard, I think Silver should have lessen the number of links in exchange for putting the actual info on the page.
In terms of visuals, there is one bar chart featuring data from Senate.gov. In it, it shows the number of years Republicans and Democrats had Senate majorities. This was a good addition, but I think Silver missed out on several opportunities to visualize more data. For instance, Silver contemplates who might control the Senate after 2018. In this section, he mentions how many seats are up for grabs in that election year and whose seats might be vulnerable. I think this is a lot of really interesting information that lends itself to a chart or a more visual list. But instead, it’s just its own paragraph with some links out to other sites. I guess on one hand, that paragraph isn’t the whole point of the piece, but I think that one change would’ve made this piece more engaging to the reader. Overall, Silver does a good job of explaining the issue and giving background and thoughts on what to expect for the future. But, he could have done more to engage the reader on a subject that is very important.