Nate Silver’s long awaited debut of FiveThirtyEight happens this afternoon. It’s no coincidence.
Silver’s site will be crunching the numbers for the NCAA basketball tournament. Today is the one day of the year when everyone really cares about those numbers.
The site is a huge initiative for Silver and ESPN. His unique analytics will cover a broad spectrum from politics to entertainment to weather. Sports will account for about 30 percent of the content.
Silver explained his vision for FiveThirtyEight in an interview with Joe Coscarelli of New York Magazine. He talks about the fox logo.
Can you explain the mythology behind the new fox logo?
The fox logo comes from a quote which was originally attributable to an obscure Greek poet: “The hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox knows many little things.” The idea being that we’re a lot of scrappy little nerds and we have different data-driven — I hate data-driven as a term — but data journalism takes on a lot of different forms for us. Often, yeah, it does mean numbers and statistics as applied to the news, but it also means data visualization, reporting on data that is both numerate and literate; down the road, it came mean investigative journalism. It can mean building models and forecasts and programs. At the same time, it’s still data journalism. It’s not enough just to be smart. There’s a particular series of methods and a way of looking at the world.Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically. We think about our philosophy for when we choose to run with a story or when we don’t. We talk about avoiding “smart takes,” quote-unquote. This is data journalism, capital-D. Within that, we take a foxlike approach to what data means. It’s not just numbers, but numbers are a big part of this. We think that’s a weakness of conventional journalism, that you have beautiful English language skills and fewer math skills, and we hope to rectify that balance a little bit.
And…
Did Bill Simmons of Grantland, which is also run independently under the massive ESPN umbrella, give you any advice about turning from an individual writer to more of a manager?
There are all these quote-unquote personal-brand sites and Grantland is the one that was ahead of the pack in terms of having two or three years under its belt. We learned a lot from them. One thing we learned is that it’s definitely possible to launch too soon.
He was realistic about the fact that for the first six months or a year, there’s no way around the fact that a lot of your time is going to be taken up with management tasks. I realized that before signing the deal with ESPN. That’s something I was willing to do — kind of eager to do in the sense that it’s something new for me and that makes it kind of challenging and fun.
At ESPN Front Row, Anna Livia Coelho did a Q/A with managing editor Mike Wilson. She asked about the sports aspect of the site.
Nate Silver became well-known for his political coverage, and ESPN is well-known for its sports coverage. So how will the new FiveThirtyEight build a bridge between the two?
We’ll build the bridge out of numbers. Politics and sports and our other areas of focus – science, economics and lifestyle – are data-rich areas. Just about everything in our lives today can be measured. We’ll use data to tell stories about the world.Will the new FiveThirtyEight feature the same amount of political coverage as before?
Politics will always be a huge story for us, particularly in election years.What are some of the stories we should expect to see in the next coming weeks?
Some snapshots for you: At this point in the race, Hillary Clinton has a better chance of becoming president than anyone in history. . . This winter wasn’t the worst by any single measure, but it was awful by a whole bunch of measures. . . “Romeo and Juliet” has a misleading title. . . Millions have left the workforce and may never come back. . . Baseball managers generally don’t make much difference in their teams’ performance.
Stay tuned for more.