Nate Silver ("Blogger for Times") joining ESPN

[buckweaver]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/media/nate-silver-blogger-for-new-york-times-is-to-join-espn-staff.html

Wow, NYT. That's cold.

Nate Silver, the statistician who attained national fame for his accurate projections about the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, is parting ways with The New York Times and moving his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN, the sports empire controlled by the Walt Disney Company, according to ESPN employees with direct knowledge of his plans.

At ESPN, Mr. Silver is expected to have a wide-ranging portfolio. Along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to “Olbermann,” the late-night ESPN2 talk show hosted by Keith Olbermann that will have its debut at the end of August. In political years, he will also have a role at ABC News, which is owned by Disney.

An ESPN spokeswoman declined to comment on Friday night. Mr. Silver declined to comment. The employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Silver’s deal could be announced as soon as Monday.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Nate Silver leaves NYT for ESPN

Wow. That's big. I figured it would be in addition to his NYT work. But he's moving the whole she-bang there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/media/nate-silver-blogger-for-new-york-times-is-to-join-espn-staff.html?smid=fb-share

 

[21]

Re: Nate Silver leaves NYT for ESPN

Nate Silver and Keith Olbermann together on ESPN. What could go wrong?

 

[Versatile]

Keep him away from Chris Broussard.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Can I dream this is a sign ESPN is moving to more stats and metrics and less Bayless yelling about stupid ****?

 

[dooley_womack1]

I would think ESPN is big enough to accommodate both, sadly.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

I would think ESPN is big enough to accommodate both, sadly.

I should have known you'd be the one to crush my dream.

 

[dooley_womack1]

I'm just in that kinda mood, sorry.

 

[Versatile]

This hire seems much more valuable for ABC News than ESPN.

 

[Alma]

This hire seems much more valuable for ABC News than ESPN.

Yes.

We have a predictive body in sports. It's called Vegas.

 

[Dick Whitman]

This hire seems much more valuable for ABC News than ESPN.

Yes.

We have a predictive body in sports. It's called Vegas.

And yet Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs and others have been quite successful.

 

[Versatile]

My point was there is so much statistical analysis out there for sports. His work on the elections was more refined and unique, and even if he has spawned imitators, he comes with more credibility than them, which can't be said for sports analysis.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

In an interview I read somewhere months ago, Silver said that he was getting bored just doing political stuff, and was looking to branch out. The Times did have him write some sports, but I guess ESPN was perfectly willing to outbid them.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Aren't most of the heavy stat guys behind the ESPN Insider wall?

If Silver is going to be free, I don't see those guys ever getting read.

 

[Versatile]

Aren't most of the heavy stat guys behind the ESPN Insider wall?

If Silver is going to be free, I don't see those guys ever getting read.

Is that mentioned somewhere? Why would he be free?

 

[LongTimeListener]

Ah, I just assumed he would be. Maybe he isn't, but that also will cut down on his profile. Of course that would be something for ESPN to worry about while Silver has cold hard cash.

Who here would sign up for Insider because of Silver? I wouldn't.

 

[Versatile]

Ah, I just assumed he would be. Maybe he isn't, but that also will cut down on his profile.

Not if he's on TV a lot, including as a regular guest on Olberman.

Certainly, Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay have pretty large profiles despite almost everything they write being behind a paywall.

 

[H.L. Mencken]

From Playbook (no permalink):

BEHIND THE CURTAIN – COURTING NATE SILVER: The battle for data whiz Nate Silver, fought secretly and aggressively by several of the nation’s top news executives for the better part of a year, was won by ESPN and ABC News (both part of The Walt Disney Company) after the 35-year-old was promised extensive air time, a role in the Oscars (airing on ABC through at least 2020), and a digital empire that may include websites devoted to weather, education, economics and other topics. When it came to money, Silver was aggressive but not greedy, according to people familiar with the negotiations. Instead, he was focused on how he could expand the franchise he had built around FiveThirtyEight (the total number of electoral votes). FiveThirtyEight.com began as a standalone blog in 2008, and became part of NYTimes.com in 2010 as part of a three-year licensing agreement that ends next month.

In a stroke of luck for Silver, the negotiations began shortly after the frenzy over his 2012 forecasts showing President Obama would be easily reelected, which had become a running topic on cable news and late-night television – and even drew a shout-out from the president himself. There was early interest from NBC and Bloomberg. But for many months, Silver’s conversations have pitted ESPN/ABC against The Times. Executive Editor Jill Abramson led the Times negotiations, and retaining Silver was such as high priority that publisher and chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and CEO Mark Thompson were involved. The reasons Times executives were so obsessed with Silver were both financial and psychic:

--On the financial side, Silver was a huge traffic driver for NYTimes.com in political years. On Election Day 2012, The New Republic’s Mark Tracy called Silver a “One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times” and “The Times’s biggest brand”: ““FiveThirtyEight is drawing huge traffic,’ … Abramson told me … ‘What’s interesting is a lot of the traffic is coming just for Nate.’ … [E]arlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of [visits to The Times’s politics coverage] included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent. … Silver’s blog has buoyed more than just the politics coverage, becoming a significant traffic-driver for the site as a whole. Earlier this year, approximately 1 percent of visits to the New York Times included FiveThirtyEight. … Yesterday, it was 20 percent.”

--On the psychic side, Abramson and Washington Bureau Chief David Leonhardt, another key player in the drive to keep Silver, saw his brand-within-a-brand as a wave of the future. They wanted Silver to bring his secret sauce to other areas of coverage. And they want to develop other Nate Silvers, in the mold of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s pioneering DealBook. So Silver’s role as the template increased his value to The Times.

Silver had told The Times that he wanted to expand to weather, economics and anyplace else at The Times that had statistics and numbers he could bring to life. He had already begun doing that, with “Claims on I.R.S. Are Challenged By Probability,” which ran in the paper, as did an examination of Chief Justice John Roberts’s use of statistics, along with “Health Care Drives Increase in Government Spending” and “Congressional Proposal Could Create ‘Tax Bubble.’” In December, Silver had his first front-page story in the print paper.

Early this year, The Times laid out a plan that would give Silver a staff of six to 12 bloggers to focus on a variety of topics, modeled on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog at The Washington Post. The plan was so specific that it named Megan Liberman, an up-and-coming deputy news editor at The Times, as Silver’s editor. As recently as last month, some executives at The Times were confident Silver would stay, mainly because they had given him everything he had asked for. Silver is very interested in prestige, and the prestige of The Times was a huge deal to him. But Silver, who first made his name with forecasts for Major League Baseball players, still loves sports. At times, he felt unwelcome in the Times Sports section, and seemed to struggle to fit into its culture. The section is among the most innovative at the paper, but not in the areas that are Silver’s wheelhouse.

ESPN’s recruitment drive was led by President John Skipper and John Walsh, executive vice president and executive editor, who have brought a more literate style to ESPN and are pushing the organization in a more analytical direction. Silver’s youth and credibility were hugely attractive. The model they proposed to Silver was Bill Simmons, “The Sports Guy,” who has a personal megabrand within the ESPN brand through his “B.S. Report,” blogs and podcasts. ESPN kept Simmons in part by making him editor-in-chief of a new ESPN website, Grantland.com, devoted to long-form journalism. In the quest for Silver, ESPN enlisted ABC News, which could provide a high-profile platform during elections and conventions. And Silver clicked with ABC’s political personalities: George Stephanopoulos, Jonathan Karl, Jeff Zeleny and Rick Klein.

ESPN has deep pockets, and the rich, multi-platform offer to Silver, funded mostly by ESPN, is a drop in the bucket. Under the deal, to be announced soon, his flagship will return to FiveThirtyEight.com, which currently clicks through to NYTimes.com. The business model mirrors Grantland’s: a strong, independent brand that ladders up to the bigger brand of ESPN (and, in this case, ABC News). Nate will appear on the air on ESPN and ABC, and will get “verticals,” or web hubs, devoted to a variety of new topics. He’s very interested in education, so there’s been a lot of conversation about that. And, of course, weather and economics. His Oscars predictions did well for The Times, and now he’ll work for the TV home of the Oscars.

Silver informed Abramson of his decision on Friday. She was none too pleased – a yearlong strategy, up in smoke. And Abramson is sensitive to the perception of Disney raiding The Times: Don Van Natta Jr., who was part of two Pulitzer-winning teams at the Times and produced muscular exposés on the British tabloid hacking scandal, became a senior writer for ESPN at the beginning of 2012. And Times correspondents Jeff Zeleny and Susan Saulny were named ABC correspondents in February. In response for a request to comment, The Times provided a 21-word statement: “We valued our partnership with Nate, particularly during the 2012 election campaign, and we wish him every success in the future.”

 

[Alma]

This hire seems much more valuable for ABC News than ESPN.

Yes.

We have a predictive body in sports. It's called Vegas.

And yet Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs and others have been quite successful.

Not as successful as Vegas.

Nate Silver will have a month to take a good, full crack at predicting the NFL. We'll see.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Sports predictions are so different from elections. This has come up before -- Silver weighing in on the MVP debate and all the ensuing reactions from others that "haha SEE!! Nate Silver says it's Trout!" But that isn't what he does, at least on 538 -- he translates historical information and the degree of certainty to which it can be counted on.

I don't see him ever coming up with a 99.6 percent chance of victory for any particular Super Bowl champion. In fact I can't really think of anything in sports that he is going to be able to predict to that level. I'm sure it will still be interesting, but it isn't going to set the agenda or lead the conversation the way his political work did.