FiveThirtyEight posts articles on sports, politics, and other topics, usually analyzed with data. I wondered if there were patterns to when the articles were published. I wrote a PowerShell script to get the HTML from each page of past articles. It captures the date text for each of the 10 articles listed on the page. It then uses RegEx to get the year, day of the month, month, hour of the day, and minute of the hour. Using PowerShell’s Date object, it calculates the week of the year and day of the week. Alternatively, I could have outputted just the date and done the rest in Excel. I ran the script on October 25, 2016.
We’ll look at each of the five sections individually and then put together.
FiveThirtyEight started out on its own in 2008. It came under the New York Times in 2010. FiveThirtyEight as it appears today began in March 2014 when it came under ESPN. When it started, it mostly dealt with politics.
Starting in 2014, under ESPN, sports, science, economics, and life articles were published in large numbers.
The week with the spike, week 44, is the week before the presidential election. The data was collected in week 43, so week 44 would be even higher and the rest of the year would probably be brought up to the average.
The spike in week 11, March 13-19, is probably due to March Madness. Week 22, May 29-June 4, is the other peak. That’s probably from the start of the NBA Finals.
The spike in Life articles at week 28 is due to a series on gun deaths published during this week in 2016.
The individual sections weren’t that interesting, so I just showed the total. Articles are pretty constant over a month. Day 31 is much less since some months only have 30 days.
Politics has a lot more articles on weekends than life does. I think this is because politics is important enough to get an article out quickly. To address an election that just happened, for example. The life articles are less in reaction to specific events and are more about trends in American life, so it doesn’t matter when they come out.
In total, 89% of articles are published Monday – Friday.
The sections have large differences in when in the day they are published. Politics is bigger later in the day. It also has a rise and fall between 6 AM and 8 AM.
Sports has the same rise and fall from 6 AM to 8 AM. It peaks in the middle of the day and there’s little going on after 6 PM.
The science writers are early risers: 36% of the articles are published before 8 AM.
Economics shows a similar pattern: 52% of articles are published before 8 AM.
32% of Life articles are published before 8 AM and 57% before 9 AM.
A cooler way to look at this is like minutes on a clock.
Either articles are set to be published at a certain time, or writers are waiting to hit Publish until a round number comes along.