[digitallis42]

And by "buried" you mean "dedicated a whole screen to it at legible size"? I don't wanna go back and count, but as I was scrolling through the sequence on mobile, it's definitely in there, up front and clear. Maybe you had a different experience of the website?

I appreciate data skepticism, but your point about the 1978 blizzard doesn't really help, as blizzards and snow events in general are not generally associated with extreme cold events.

Also, the site tells you about the changes in whatever place you plugged in. I'm not clear on why you're calling this "hyper-focusing on specific locations". It's literally telling you what's going on in your neighborhood and gives good reasons to even then discount the new number.

[timr]

By "buried", I mean: "hidden in a collapsed 'about this data' accordion, below the 'change in lowest winter temperature' color bar, in the fourth text box that appears on downward scrolling."

Unless you're seeing a wildly different website than I am, this is a strange definition of "up front and clear".

But just to belabor the point a bit, if I were a journalist covering this, my lede -- the very first paragraph of the story -- would be something like this:

"Recently, the USDA updated its plant hardiness map for the first time in 11 years. Among other changes, it based the definition of winter temperatures on data from 1991-2020, dropping data from 1976-1991 as part of the update. This resulted in a calculated increase in lowest winter temperatures in many locations across the United States."

Simple. Factual. Unbiased. Provides necessary context. It isn't that hard to be a good journalist here. I hesitate to speculate, but my suspicion is that this was buried because it weakens a narrative that the writers and editors were trying to achieve, by adding nuance.