Nate Silver ("Blogger for Times") joining ESPN

Wonder if they're gonna put him in Lynn Hoppes' old office ... if Lynn has cleared out all his dreck, that is ...

 

By when? By mid-November, when he beat Alabama? Yeah, not then.

I don't know what you mean "surprise" in Manziel wasn't a surprise in that he'd never played a college game before the year. A shitty player winning the Heisman? Is that a surprise? Help me out here. Outside of Toretta, how often has the prize went to a player who's demonstrably not one of the best ten players that year?

 

I find very little independent thinking in Kepner's and the NYT's baseball coverage.

 

We're talking about the lag period between when the season ends and when the winner is announced.

 

Silver told reporters today that "culture stuff" was not a big factor in his leaving the Times, saying he had lots of support from editors.
Assuming he's telling the truth, that leaves money, always a totally valid reason for changing employers.

 

When people are talking "surprise" on here, they mean after the season is over and before the award is announced.

 

The six days? OK, well, no surprises then.

I'd love to see Silver try and predict voting results. Knowing how contrarian sportswriters like to be, they'll vote for someone else just to prove a point.

 

Yes, the six days. And the weeks leading up to that, too, of course. There used to be surprises. Now there aren't. The surprises you're talking about are surprises about how the season goes. The surpises we're talking about are how voters break once all or most of the information is in.

 

In the wake of Helen Thomas' passing, is it worth asking if the WH press corp has returned to their pre-Watergate role as

As Mark Leibovich's new book This Town points out, the media seems much more interested in being a part of the D.C. establishment than in breaking news.

Silver's not a reporter in the traditional sense, so he can't/won't change that, but he does/did help expose it.

 

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nate-silver-warns-against-overestimating-his-value,33212/

Silver also noted that, considering recent statistical trends within the television industry, there is an overwhelming likelihood that Keith Olbermann’s new weeknight talk show on ESPN will be fucking awful.

 

He said that of punditry, not reporting.

Yes, that sounds like New York Times politics reporting.

 

Ah, my bad -- though I wonder if the Times public editor's sources on that fit into both categories, as Times folks often do.