Silver, the man who got the election right, quits New York Times for ESPN
Nate Silver, the data whizkid who won international fame for accurately prediction the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, is leaving The New York Times - a big blow to the paper where he had become a star attraction.
Nate Silver: The guy who keeps getting it right
He is moving to ESPN and ABC with his FiveThirtyEight franchise - named for the total number of electoral votes in presidential elections.
The 35-year-old has been, been promised extensive air time at ESPN, the sports empire controlled by the Walt Disney Company, including a role in the Oscars and political exposure on ABC News. Also in the mix, according to Politico, a digital empire that may include websites devoted to weather, education, economics and other topics.
On money, Silver was said to be "aggressive but not greedy," according to people familiar with the negotiations.
Instead, he focused on how he could expand the franchise he had built around FiveThirtyEight , which began as a standalone blog in 2008, and became part of NYTimes.com in 2010 .
At ESPN, along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to Keith Olbermann's late-night ESPN2 talk show that begins at the end of August.
The Times really wanted to keep him. Early this year, they 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.
Last month, some executives at the Times were reportedly confident Silver would stay, mainly because they had given him everything he had asked for. But ESPN is said to have been after Silver for at least five years.
Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, said of Silver, "He was doing something that is fairly rare in journalism -- he was doing the math. I say that not entirely jokingly. Journalists are notoriously bad at this.
"it was pretty delicious to watch someone doing the math and to see pundit after pundit make fools of themselves with their 'intuition.'"
Before his election fame, Silver was a baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform.
In November last year President Obama joked that Silver had accurately predicted which turkeys the president would pardon for the Thanksgiving dinner.
“Nate Silver completely nailed it,” said. the president,“The guy’s amazing.”
Prior to the 2012 presidential election, roughly one out of every five visitors to NYTimes.com visited his blog, FiveThirtyEight.