For those who can’t get enough of Nate Silver, here is the transcript of his Monday teleconference with ESPN president John Skipper.
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JOHN SKIPPER: I’m very happy to announce that Nate Silver will be joining ESPN, and I’m thrilled because Nate has a really unique blend of creativity, journalism and statistical analysis that he can bring to ESPN. This will really extend our leadership in using analytics in our storytelling and will bring Nate back a little bit to his sports roots, which I believe he’s happy about and we’re thrilled about.
The most important piece of business we’re going to do early on is Nate is going to bring FiveThirtyEight over to ESPN, and his first priority is going to be to serve as the editor in chief of that site and build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months.
Grantland is a little bit of a model for this in terms of how that will look. It’ll also be a little bit of a model in terms of the independence that Nate will enjoy in doing that. Our expectation is he will determine the content of that site. Politics remains at the core of what he does, so politics is going to be important there.
You heard me suggest that he’s getting back to his sports roots, so clearly sports is going to be important there. But I think that the range of topics will be quite wide, again will be determined exactly by Nate.
Because politics is so important here, we’re lucky and fortunate that ABC News is a partner in this and will provide a platform for Nate, particularly during election years relative to politics.
Much of that is to be determined despite some reports to the contrary. We have not worked all of these things out and we’ll be happy to answer more specifics on that later, but let me give Nate an opportunity to make some remarks. Nate?
NATE SILVER: Thank you, John, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. As I said in the press release, this is really kind of a dream job for me, and the more we thought about it, the more excited that I became and I think ESPN became, as well.
You know, what I’ve done now for politics at FiveThirtyEight is an approach we think is applicable to lots of areas. Obviously I have a background in sports, and that would be a big focus here, but it’s not just going to be a politics site or a sports site. There’s lots of potential in business and economics and weather and health and education and technology and culture.
We’re not going to necessarily cover all those things all at once, but it’s really more of a horizontal approach for how we do journalism and how we make data a résumé for people in terms of storytelling and visuals and good journalism and everything else, and I think I’ve found the perfect partner to do that given the resources that ESPN and ABC have.
I would say also the importance of Grantland, a successful precedent, was very important for me. There were a lot of dimensions I thought about. This decision took me a long time, but one of the pivotal ones was what I call execution, based on who can actually put this vision into practice, who can be a good partner. Based on meeting John and Marie Donoghue and Ben Sherwood at ABC and Bill Simmons and David Cho, I have a lot of confidence that they’re going to do this the right way.
We have to react on the fly a little bit. You can’t plan for something this new and different perfectly, but I really think that we’re going to help one another kind of execute our vision and have a really, really compelling web product.
Q. You mentioned execution. I mean, what was kind of the image in your mind of what your sort of dream site was going to look like, and what was it about ESPN that they could execute it that maybe you couldn’t do some other places?
NATE SILVER: Well, I mean, Grantland is a pretty good precedent for roughly the size we might be looking at. I think we might be a little smaller on launch, but we have a site and we should have a great team, but it’s also built around someone’s sensibility, in Bill’s case at Grantland and my case at the new FiveThirtyEight.
Also that it really does ‑‑ I mean, it’s an independent voice within ESPN as far as Grantland, so there’s plenty of things that other people might not like, but it’s still Bill’s voice and the voice of Bill’s contributors. At the same time, there are a lot of strategic relationships that it has with other entities.
But yeah, the fact that ESPN and ABC and Disney are really good at figuring out how to build products.
For some other suitors, there were a lot of possibilities. We just had a little bit less confidence there.
I do want to say one thing up front: This is a case not where we felt like we had one good option and a number of bad options. We were lucky to be blessed with a lot of very good choices, and this one was kind of a 9.5 out of 10 or a 9.8 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 when you look at everything. So I don’t want to speak ill of any other alternatives, but just that Grantland precedent was as close as anything in media right now to what we see the vision of FiveThirtyEight as being, just being able to spend time with Bill and David Cho and work through some issues that they dealt with ‑‑ the first time it’s going to save me not every headache, but a lot of headaches over the next few months.
Q. I have two questions for you. First off, at this point have you made any hires for the site that previously have not been announced?
NATE SILVER: No.
Q. And then secondly, from what you understand at this point, how often will you appear on ESPN’s television platforms?
NATE SILVER: Well, what I’d say is that our focus is on the web product first and foremost. I’d say particularly in the first six, nine, 12 months, and remember, I’m already ‑‑ my writing and modeling skills are pretty important a feature at FiveThirtyEight, but I’m also going to be charged with helping to be an editor in chief and build out the business, so those are almost two full‑time jobs by themselves.
I do think obviously in the longer term there are so many resources here in terms of television, in terms of film, also a little bit in different products that we’ll have a lot of choices to make, but this is a web‑centered product, and we haven’t discussed very many specifics at all about which programs I’ll be on. I’m sure that will evolve over time, but I assume people assume, oh, it’s ESPN so it’s TV. I’ll be on the network some I’m sure, but we really want to get the website rolled out first.
JOHN SKIPPER: Let me point out a couple of things. The first is we don’t have a programmatic plan for where Nate is going to appear. It’s going to be much more opportunistic and it’s going to tie in much more with what he’s doing on FiveThirtyEight that we think will be interesting on television.
The dramatic exception to this would probably be ABC News during an election cycle where we do have every intention of Nate appearing on ABC News to talk about the elections.
The second point I would make is there have been some speculative notions about where decisions have been made about Nate on television, and those are just wrong. We have not made any decision about Nate appearing on the Keith Olbermann show, we have not made any decisions about Nate being on the Oscars. My expectation is that Nate and I and Ben Sherwood and other folks will think about where this will make sense, and we do not want to overburden Nate either early on when it is quite a task to start a website, hire people, figure out sensibility, do design, figure out priorities, and we’ll figure out when we’re going to do this on television.
But you should not assume that we’ve made those decisions.
Q. How many years is Nate’s deal for?
JOHN SKIPPER: It’s a long‑term deal, multiyear deal. Actually Marie Donoghue actually did the deal with Nate. I’m not actually sure where we ended up, and I am pretty sure we’re not going to tell you exactly, except you probably could get the election cycles out and figure out that this deal is going to run through some election cycle.
Q. Just wondering exactly, some reports have been doing some statistical analysis to weather prediction. Just wondering how exactly that works within the network, within the deal and how you sort of bring that analysis to weather prediction?
NATE SILVER: Well, I know that it’s going to be Nate Silver coming up with the weather model, but there are some meteorologists out there who write in a very compelling way and I think might deserve to get a larger platform, so it’s a vertical we’re going to think about.
One other thing I’d say by the way is I guarantee there will be some politics and sports content at FiveThirtyEight, almost for sure some economics content. Beyond that, thought, it might be a case where if we find the right person, we might hire in that vertical or not do so otherwise. One very valuable piece of advice that Bill Simmons gave me bided their time waited until they had the right voice for college football, for example, at Grantland.
Between ESPN and ABC’s resources, we don’t have to cover every single story in the news hole. We want to cover what we cover really well in a really differentiated, original way. We’re looking for people who can think and do math and write, and those skills don’t always overlap, so it’s going to be an intense search process for the right candidates to work for us.
But whether it’s a topic which I’m kind of passionate about personally, it might be a lot of fun to cover a topic if you can find the right voice.
Q. The New York Times public editor mentioned today, described you as a disruptive force at the Times and how she had gotten some criticism from colleagues including some high profile political journalists. I wonder did you ever feel that you were too constrained within the Times culture to do what you wanted to do or that you were not supported in any way at the times?
NATE SILVER: No, look, I had plenty of support I felt from Jill and from other key people at the Times. We don’t really want to dwell too much on my relationships there. But it was not a ‑‑ I would say I love the people at ESPN, but this culture stuff at the Times was not a big factor in the decision.
Q. Nate, what size of staff are we looking at eventually?
NATE SILVER: We don’t know exactly. I mean, we have a rough sense of what the budget will be but we have to figure out how to spend that on front staff, meaning writers, on people who are designers, but yeah, we can’t be ‑‑ it’s to be determined.
Q. No rough estimates? Are we talking dozens? Hundreds? Scores?
NATE SILVER: I would say definitely not hundreds. I mean, no. Look, Grantland is one precedent. You can kind of figure out roughly the size of the staff over there. I’m not sure we’re going to be quite as large as that at first, but you never know. One of the great things about this opportunity is you’re with a business that knows how to invest in different properties, and maybe things really take off and you’re in a hockey stick growth curve, or maybe you just have a suite of a site where you have four or five people and they’re four or five really good people, and that’s what it is, and it could be either one. We have a lot of flexibility.
Q. And I’m sorry, I don’t know the size of Grantland. Can anyone tell me what that is?
JOHN SKIPPER: It’s small dozens.
Q. I understand that you guys haven’t made firm decisions about what you will and will not be doing with the Oscars, but what are some possibilities of ways that you might cover that? I know in the past you have predicted them using the sort of statistics‑based approach, but that hasn’t really been tremendously successful, and so I just wonder is it always going to be a statistics‑based approach or would you look to do more sort of general ‑‑
NATE SILVER: I think if you look at the track record, there’s no one who has a very successful track record at the Oscars, really, and a lot of the insider gossip is also wrong. Unlike in politics where you can avoid the insider gossip by looking at the polls, there’s not a great system to predict the Oscars. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try and have some fun with it and try and learn different things.
But look, one of the things people really misunderstand about what I do is we’re making probabilistic forecasts, right. You’re not saying definitively this will happen for sure; we’re not clairvoyant. We’re trying to use the data that’s available to forecast and prepare people for the world, just as they do in weather forecasting, and you’re limited by the quality of the data and the complexity of the problem and a whole host of other things.
The Oscars are a very political process. I hope people won’t take everything that we do deathly seriously. One word we tossed around here at ESPN is just the F word, which is fun, that we can have some fun with things. We can have different tonality on the blog, we can be cheeky and have different ‑‑ it doesn’t all have to be so serious all the time, and I hope people don’t take the Oscars as a life‑or‑death thing. But yeah, it’s another opportunity I’ll look at.
Q. Can you articulate a little bit about what you expect the voice of FiveThirtyEight to be as you have this larger platform?
NATE SILVER: Yeah, it’s something we have to think about, and I think the voice of the blog changed a lot from the original FiveThirtyEight.com to the New York Times, and maybe it’s going to be somewhere in between. But we differentiate FiveThirtyEight as being a smart site. It’s going to be analytics driven, and there’s a data numbers component to just about everything we do.
Now, in terms of what tone you use, we’ll have to sort that out. It might even be that we have kind of a blog within FiveThirtyEight as Grantland has blogs like The Triangle that are more informal, and then you have articles which are a little bit longer, receive more edits and so forth.
We have to have different tenors that we can adopt, and also we’re going to be bringing on a whole different team and they’re going to have their own individual voices, too, and we want to let those voices sing, so to speak. But this is all stuff we have to think about the next few months.
JOHN SKIPPER: Yeah, I think one thing, if I jump in, one thing is the subject matter lends itself to really interesting graphics, and a lot of times it’s really fun to see what you can do sort of illustratively as opposed to just writing about it. So I think you’ll see an interesting looking site, as well, I hope.
NATE SILVER: Yeah, I’m a big snob about visual design. I’m coming kind of from a family of designers and architects. It often is the best way to convey complex information. So how things look, and we think the interactive and graphical features will have ‑‑ are every bit as important as the written word, and it’s also something which requires more resources to build the site up, finding the right design directors and so forth and the right templates.
It’s not an easy thing to do; that’s one thing I will say. I will miss the New York Times. Those guys are extremely talented at their interactives and their graphics, so that’s something I’ll miss there. But we’re going to hope to replicate it as best we can at the new FiveThirtyEight.
Q. Just really quick, wondering when the new FiveThirtyEight.com goes live?
NATE SILVER: That’s among the things that we have to determine. What I would say if it’s possible to have an interim site where it’s very plain and it might just be like a Tumblr or a medium blog or something where I’m writing, but we want to emerge strong out of the gate. We want to have a good team in place. It’s hard to go from 0 to 60 immediately, so it’s going to be ‑‑ it’ll come out in the impending months I guess is what we’ll say, and we have to think strategically in terms of how long it takes to build out the right team before we determine when we go live with the big launch. But there will be some interim writing. If I want to write on the New Jersey gubernatorial election or something, then you’ll be able to find my writing in the interim.
Q. A sense of weeks, months, years?
JOHN SKIPPER: I think months. This is not a simple matter, and we haven’t started on it yet because of course it’s not appropriate for us to do yet. The FiveThirtyEight.com will be on the New York Times site probably through the end of August, and in some number of months after that we’ll announce the launch of a new site.
Q. Just a couple of quick questions: First, it’s not quite clear, unless it is and I missed it, my understanding is that Nate owns roughly all of FiveThirtyEight. Does ESPN now own FiveThirtyEight or is it still a licensing deal or is it a contract?
NATE SILVER: I think we can speak to that, right? ESPN is buying the URL and the FiveThirtyEight trade name, so that differs from the current deal with the New York Times. It’s not a pure licensing deal. It is a more all‑in partnership.
Q. Are there any people ‑‑ it sounds like you talked to Bill Simmons, people at ABC. Are there any people you consulted with that you can tell us about who might be a little more surprising or unexpected or we may not have heard about in terms of your making your decision?
NATE SILVER: I want to give a ‑‑ my attorney Steve Shepard did a great job with this, and he’s someone I worked on with the Times deal in 2010, and he’s a really smart guy, and he knows the media landscape really well. He’s not one of these guys that works for a big, high‑powered agency, and he gives advice that you can trust and he’s someone who really came to trust and to like the people we met at ESPN. So he had a lot of influence on the decision.
It was a multiway decision. I think one thing that’s been a little bit misreported is that it was just ESPN and the Times. It’s not true, but there’s no good incentive for me to say who some of the other names were. We had a lot of intriguing offers.
Q. And I guess another question is you keep saying we, and I’m wondering if that’s sort of the royal we, or if there’s ‑‑
NATE SILVER: Look, FiveThirtyEight is a team at the New York Times. I have Micah Cohen helping me out and Megan Liberman, who’s been a great editor for the site, and kind of consulting with my counsel Steve. It feels like a we, and it’s going to become even more of a team effort here at ESPN. So it is a little bit of a tic, but that’s really how I think about it as kind of a bigger project, and part of what I want to do is I’m tired of doing everything kind of by myself. I want to have a team and make it more sustainable. I think this type of journalism is going to be a huge influence on the world, and so let’s kind of plant some seeds and let it grow.
JOHN SKIPPER: I thought maybe the royal we was Nate and the new baby.
Q. Nate, you said before, going back to the Oscars, that you’re limited by the quality of the data. I’m wondering what data do you find relevant, and secondly, although no decisions have been made by Oscar broadcast, what’s the current thinking about your participation?
NATE SILVER: You know, it’s funny because among other things I can be kind of a critic of the way the media covers certain stories at times, and the fact that there are such specific accounts about things I’ll be doing or not that are completely wrong, like things we literally never talked about in a dozen meetings or something, so it’s an opportunity, but there are no plans. There’s no thinking at all.
In terms of the data on the Oscars, one thing that would be useful is in a poll you see what the percentages are, so we think of the awards leading up to the Oscars as analogous to polls. If you knew how close the results had been, where Argo was at 21 percent and Zero Dark Thirty was at 18 percent versus a blowout, then that would help some, and you’d have more precision as you do with polls.
Q. And no thinking at this point about participation in the broadcast?
NATE SILVER: No, we literally haven’t had a conversation about it. We talked about a lot of things, John and Marie and I, but not about that. It just didn’t even really occur to us until ‑‑
JOHN SKIPPER: Until it occurred to everybody else.
Q. How much did you pay for the website, guys?
JOHN SKIPPER: We won’t comment on that.
Q. Nate, you mentioned a number of times throughout this conference that Grantland was one of the big reasons why you were swayed in coming over. I think a lot of people are familiar with it. It’s a very nice site. If ESPN didn’t have Grantland, how important was it to your decision making?
NATE SILVER: It’s hard to go through those hypotheticals. My lawyer says ‑‑ let me see if I can get this wrong. He says, well, if we had ham, we’d have ham and eggs, if we had eggs, right. So you can go through hypotheticals and say what if ‑‑
Q. I’m not asking a hypothetical.
NATE SILVER: Yeah, but it’s hard to know.
Q. Lastly, the public editor at the New York Times wrote today that she had heard from other staff members of the Times that Nate didn’t seem to fit in. Is that true?
NATE SILVER: Look, I’m interested in running a website and building out a business here and having my opinion to weigh in on different topics. I’m not interested in who I’m getting a beer with. I have plenty of people in my social circles for that. So these cultural issues I think are getting a little more play than is appropriate.
Q. I was wondering, there’s a lot of talk of using your analytical skills in the Oscar and awards show realm. Do you see it as being applicable in any other part of entertainment like the television realm?
NATE SILVER: Yeah, there might be things that are more kind of routine, like what can you do to predict television ratings and so forth. But look, I’d also say we are aware that to do physical analysis takes a lot of skill, and so we don’t necessarily want to delve into things where we feel like we’re not going to add a fair amount of value, right, and we definitely don’t want to create the perception that we can snap our fingers and predict everything. If you read my book, “The Signal and the Noise,” it’s skeptical about the ability to kind of have a magic formula, but it’s more of a kind of thinking about data in a robust way, seeing the world through a more numbers driven way, and prediction is one tool for that.
But look, if we think we can have a good model, then we’ll do it or have some fun with it and we’ll do it, but if we think it’s not a good product then we’re not going to put it out there.
Q. I was just curious, you mentioned a little bit about how it’s not going to be strictly sports or strictly political. What in your opinion would be sort of like the dream home page of what kind of topics you’re covering, if you can go a little bit more specifically into what kind of topics you would like to cover?
NATE SILVER: I mean, one model we’ve talked about is kind of the old ‑‑ the current actually USA Today where you have those four sections; you have news, sports, money and life, and you can kind of fit most things we want to cover into one of those four bundles.
So you have obviously sports is going to be an important focus of the site. On the news side we’re probably more going to be concerned about elections in particular, but there’s some other types of news. Weather is one I mentioned. On the life side it can be fun, kind of cultural stuff, what’s the best place to live, also education‑related things, and then obviously we think we can do maybe a better job than current competitors about how you present economic data to people that understand some of the uncertainty when you have a job support ad every month, what that really means.
Now, I also know that things will evolve over time, so I can’t predict what the exact mix of content will be. I do want to emphasize we’re not pulling back from politics. We’ll probably hire at least one more person to cover politics full‑time, so although my interests might be slightly more divided, we are certainly still going to be fathering election forecasts, certainly going to be writing other coverage of politics. It’s not going to be a partisan site, as FiveThirtyEight isn’t right now. It’s not going to be a political commentary, but to the extent there are data‑driven ways to look at politics, it’s been a very successful product for us and will continue to be an emphasis.
But we have an ambitious and broad take on what we’d like the site to grow into.
Q. What role will David Cho play in building up FiveThirtyEight?
JOHN SKIPPER: David Cho is a terrific resource. David has been sort of the general business manager at Grantland. I think he and Nate have become friendly, and I think he’s another person whose insight was helpful to Nate, and I think we look forward to having David help us think about how we build this out.
NATE SILVER: Yeah, look, I plan to spend a bunch of time in the coming months with David and Bill. Their experience is really, really relevant to what we’re trying to do. And as I said in general, the quality and the professionalism of the people here and throughout the ESPN family has been really key to us. This is a long‑term commitment, and no matter how many things you put down in the contract you’re going to have things you have to think through and things you have to navigate on the fly so that people that you feel like you have a good relationship already and that you trust, whose judgment you trust, that’s really valuable.
Q. Does he have an official role at FiveThirtyEight or is he just helping out?
NATE SILVER: I mean, no one has an official role right now apart from me. The decision took a long time, but the end game here has come together quite quickly, and so yeah, my focus on the next couple of months is finding the right people to build a team and a website with.
Q. I was just wondering, you said that a couple places quoted you besides ESPN. Was Politico one of them?
NATE SILVER: Was Politico one of them? I mean, you can probably make a good inference about that given my history with them, but I’m not going to make any specific comment.
Q. I’m just wondering, you said so much about Grantland, and that obviously makes sense given this deal, but what other sites or properties might be informing what you’re going for, be it tonally, esthetically or as a business model?
NATE SILVER: One other site that’s been talked about a little bit is Ezra Klein site at the Washington Post, Wonkblog, and that’s a decent precedent for what FiveThirtyEight might try and do, as well.
But this is kind of a relatively new thing, and you can name a couple of these sites right now that are kind of sub‑brands within a brand, and I think the companies who have launched them feel like they’re working pretty well for the most part, and that’s different a little bit than the current FiveThirtyEight model where it was just me and Micah and Megan.
We are trying to accommodate more of a team effort here. It’s going to require work on my part and everybody’s part up front to get the right team in place. But we think it’s going to be a very natural fit, and the fact that Grantland is the No. 1 precedent for what we’re trying to do just made the decision easier.
Q. I know that you have been a little bit unwilling to get into too much specifics about numbers here, but is there any way ‑‑ using your vast ability to talk about numbers, is there any way you can just basically lecture us a little bit on the difference, if any, between the offers between ESPN/ABC and what the counteroffer was from the New York Times?
NATE SILVER: That’s a very clever hook to try to get me to answer the question. What I’d say is that when I think about decisions there were about six different categories I looked at, and finances are one of them. We live in a capitalistic society. But the ability to ‑‑ who can execute the site, prestige, where do I have more editorial freedom, where is it going to be more fun and more challenging.
One factor here was that there’s no doubt for different reasons it might be easier for me to stay at the New York Times, but I’ve been someone who kind of every four years has shifted my career in different and subtle ways, and that motivates me, right? There are going to be some things that are challenging here, especially in the building process, but the fact that there are, I tend to succeed under those circumstances. If I get too comfortable, I become uncomfortable, ironically. So that’s more of the motivation than the kind of cash stuff.
JOHN SKIPPER: First wrap‑up thought I have is our goal here is to make Nate comfortable and happy so this is his long‑term home so he doesn’t have to do this every four years, and we’re genuine about that. We really care about smart, talented individuals who can make a difference in our creating superior content for fans, and we think that’s what Nate can do for us.
I want to end by giving a shout‑out to Ben Sherwood at ABC News. Those guys were really helpful in this, and I think we would have had a lot more questions about why ESPN if he didn’t have that outlet for Nate relative to how important politics is in his domain.
I’d like to thank everybody for joining us. I’d like to thank Nate for being willing to make a leap of faith and put at least some portion of his future. We’ll discuss the length of that portion of his future at some future date at ESPN, and we’re looking forward to working together. Thank you.