PERSON IN THE NEWS
July 26, 2013 7:28 pmFT
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
The political
forecaster shows the new power of one-man brands, says Andrew
Edgecliffe-Johnson
Early in the 2008 US
presidential campaign, a blogger on the Daily Kos website started attracting
attention. Writing under the pseudonym “Poblano”, he calculated that Hillary Clinton was not
faring nearly as well in the primaries as pundits said. One by one, his
forecasts embarrassed the pollsters and political reporters.
After months of finding flaws in
others’ poll interpretations, Nate Silver outed himself. “You can’t name
yourself after a chilli pepper and do much media stuff,” he said. His path from
anonymity to stardom began with FiveThirtyEight, the politics site he created
that year – named after the number of votes in the US electoral college. This
week it culminated in a deal to move the blog from the New York Times,
which has licensed it since 2010, to ESPN, Walt Disney’s sports network.
True to form, the
35-year-old made the decision only after analysing several variables: who could
develop FiveThirtyEight into something more ambitious, and who offered
editorial freedom, prestige, fun and money. The NYT tried to keep him but no
newspaper is a match for a sports powerhouse with $9bn of annual revenues.
The Grey Lady was
once a media pinnacle you left only in a box, and Mr Silver’s departure shocked
many journalists. But it illustrated a growing tension between media’s
traditional gatekeepers and the journalistic one-man brands who draw large
audiences but have interests – and income – outside their editorial day job.
Like a star player in
sport or on a trading floor, such signing can be hugely valuable but it can
also cause friction. Individuals who grab so much of the limelight threaten
institutions’ sense of control, wrote Andrew Sullivan, a friend of Mr Silver
who took his blog from Newsweek Daily Beast to its own site. “The NYT needed
Nate much more than he needed them.”
Mr Silver is an outsider
and a late-comer to political journalism. He was struck by how vapid the
reporting was while studying a 2006 Congressional attempt to ban internet
poker, then an important source of his income. As the 2008 vote approached, he
saw that most correspondents paid disproportionate attention to outlying
national polls and not enough to swing states. This was built into a theory,
articulated in his 2012 book The Signal and the Noise, that when we
are swamped by information we block out the parts we do not like.
His model – 2,000
lines of computer code – predicted 49 of the 50 state races in 2008. Four years later, he got all 50
right and Gawker, a blog run by his friend Nick
Denton, crowned him America’s chief wizard.
The statistical
sorcerer’s move to the Mickey Mouse empire is a return to his roots as a
sabermetrician – a cruncher of baseball data. As a boy growing up in Lansing,
Michigan, the son of a political-science professor father and community
activist mother supported the Detroit Tigers. His father would relax by
analysing stadium attendances. By 14, Nate was building models to try to
predict George HW Bush’s 1992 electoral fight with Ross Perot.
After studying
economics at the University of Chicago, Mr Silver became a KPMG consultant.
When the dry work on intra-company transfer pricing dragged, he began trying to
predict ball players’ performance. His “Pecota” model earned him a following in
baseball before he adapted his blend of sophisticated modelling and clear
narratives to politics – a sport often likened to a horse race. But it gave
rise to a popular critique, he says: “Nate’s a good baseball guy, but what does
he know about politics?”
Some critics have
been harsher. Shortly before the 2012 Obama-Romney election, Joe Scarborough, a
former Republican congressman who hosts MSNBC’s Morning Joe show,
called him a joke and an ideologue for thinking that the race was “anything but
a toss-up”. Mr Silver, who has called conventional pundits “fundamentally
useless”, bet Mr Scarborough $2000 that he would be proved right. Mr
Scarborough paid up, sending a cheque to charity, but the NYT ombudswoman
scolded Mr Silver, saying that by joining its newsroom he had lost “the right
to act like a free agent”.
In his spectacles and
brown suits, the nervy-eyed Mr Silver looks the part of the geek. But he likes
hitting back, accusing dismissive editors at Politico, a Washington news site,
of lacking curiosity for “the world outside of the bubble”, and shaming TV
prognosticators who “may as well have been flipping coins”.
Mr Silver faced
suspicion even from some NYT colleagues. “I don’t think Nate Silver ever really
fit into the Times culture,” Margaret Sullivan, its public editor, wrote this
week. “He was, in a word, disruptive.” Mr Silver smiles at this, saying: “We
look at the word ‘disruptive’ as a positive.”
Yet he has jumped to
another big media group, suggesting brands such as the NYT or ESPN still appeal
to disruptive stars. Mr Silver notes that other big names found homes in large
companies, such as Wonkbook, Ezra Klein’s policy blog for the Washington Post,
and Grantland, Bill Simmons’ irreverent ESPN sports site.
The Signal and the Noise showed Mr Silver’s range, taking
in subjects from weather forecasting to the global financial crisis. He has
been courted by Hollywood and Wall Street , eager to source his wizardry, but
he wants a larger audience.
At ESPN he will roam
well beyond politics. “To some extent the point’s been proven in politics,” he
notes. After a run of accurate election predictions, he adds, “to be frank
[there’s] more downside risk than upside risk.”
Mr Silver plans to
apply his model to subjects as diverse as education, the Oscars and economics.
“We might start out by trying to forecast US payroll numbers,” he says, teasing
that he is already working on creating economic indices. Some would like to see
him go further. Mr Klein tweeted this week: “Nate Silver for Fed chairman”.
The writer is the FT’s media editor
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