You have no shortage of excellent news sources — sources that expertly report and analyze news as it happens. Like you, those of us at The Upshot rely on those sources every day. So why are we starting a new site to help people understand the news?
We have two main reasons. One, we believe many people don’t understand the news as well as they would like. They want to grasp big, complicated stories — Obamacare, inequality, political campaigns, the real-estate and stock markets — so well that they can explain the whys and hows of those stories to their friends, relatives and colleagues.
We believe we can help readers get to that level of understanding by writing in a direct, plain-spoken way, the same voice we might use when writing an email to a friend. We’ll be conversational without being dumbed down. We will build on the excellent journalism The New York Times is already producing, by helping readers make connections among different stories and understand how those stories fit together. We will not hesitate to make analytical judgments about why something has happened and what is likely to happen in the future. We’ll tell you how we came to those judgments — and invite you to come to your own conclusions.
The second reason we’re starting the Upshot is that the Internet and the spread of digital data have created new opportunities for journalists. Data-based reporting used to be mostly a tool for investigative journalists who could spend months sorting through reams of statistics to emerge with an exclusive story. But the world now produces so much data, and personal computers can analyze it so quickly, that data-based reporting deserves to be a big part of the daily news cycle.
One of our highest priorities will be unearthing data sets — and analyzing existing ones — in ways that illuminate and explain the news. Our first day of material, both political and economic, should give you a sense of what we hope to do with data. As with our written articles, we aspire to present our data in the clearest, most engaging way possible. A graphic can often accomplish that goal better than prose. Luckily, we work alongside The Times’s graphics department, some of the most talented data-visualization specialists in the country. It’s no accident that the same people who created the interactive dialect quiz, the deficit puzzle and the rent-vs-buy calculator will be working on The Upshot.
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