Silver, who rose to fame with his award-winning website, FiveThirtyEight.com, also will appear on ESPN and its broadcast partner, ABC News. FiveThirtyEight.com, which had been hosted on The New York Times website since 2010, will be independent of ESPN but connect to other sites owned by the network and parent company Disney.

Silver gained attention analyzing baseball statistics before he moved to politics. In 2012, FiveThirtyEight.com correctly predicted the presidential election outcome in all 50 states. The site will include forecasts of the 2014 and 2016 elections. […]

The FiveThirtyEight’s new incarnation will allow Silver to return to his sports roots while expanding his approach to other disciplines.

In the brief ESPN article quoted above, Silver says he now has his “dream job.”

But shouldn’t working for the New York Times have been a dream job?

If you want to get a taste of some of the tensions in journalism today, read this post today by the NYT’s public editor Margaret Sullivan: Nate Silver Went Against the Grain for Some at The Times.

In that revealing and somewhat disturbing post, Sullivan downplays her own criticism of Silver at the height of last fall’s campaign and overstates her support for him. I blogged about the issues involved (CLICK HERE for that lengthy post a few days before the fall election), and the various nuances of the controversy left me convinced that Sullivan herself didn’t even quite understand what Silver was even doing with his ratings and aggregation of various state and national polls.

Now comes this from Sullivan’s post today:

I donâ€t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.

His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read.

As it turned out, of course, the traditional “horse race” model of how to cover politics led many Americans — and apparently even the Romney campaign itself — to many flat, dead, totally wrong conclusions about the state of the presidential race.

If Silver “disrupted” that journalistic culture, then good. The Times should have been embracing Silver and his approach not only to political polling but also to other fields heavy in data.

And this from Sullivan:

A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.

Let me echo Kevin Drum’s thoughts in Mother Jones about that snippet:

Even for those of us who are pretty cynical about political reporting, this is astonishing. If I were editor of the Times, I’d do whatever it took to find out who those three are, and then fire them instantly. Whoever they are, they shouldn’t be trusted to cover the pig races at a country fair, let alone write about politics for the most influential newspaper in the country.

Again, Silver and his team’s analysis of last fall’s presidential election, not to mention their work on other elections and topics, was spot on. Reading and watching other political coverage throughout the cycle, Americans might have had the idea that the Obama-Romney matchup was a highly volatile affair with voters switching sides constantly, with large numbers of undecided voters, and with totally unpredictable turnout. But while there were some mild surprises in the final numbers, it all went pretty much according to the script that Silver and his team laid out: Obama had a relatively solid lead many months ahead of the campaign, that lead shrank by a small amount after the first debate, and Obama won rather handily, as Silver’s model projected.

Nationwide, Obama ended up winning 51.07 percent to 47.21 percent for Romney. Silver’s model’s final projection was that Obama would win 50.8 percent to 48.3 percent.

I can’t say I’m sorry that Silver has left the Times — we can expect that he’ll continue to do his rigorous analysis wherever he is.

But the handling of Silver while he was with the NYT and Sullivan’s statements regarding his departure send up some big red flags about political coverage at the paper, not to mention raising real concerns about the Times’ adaptability as new media continues to put pressure on traditional journalism.

The blog is based at the New York Times, but Silver developed his own methodology over the years for analyzing available polling data for national elections (and other things too). The Times lured him under their umbrella after the 2008 election, but he has his own brand and could easily go back out on his own.

I hope he does, actually.

A few days ago, the NYT’s Public Editor Margaret Sullivan posted Under Attack, Nate Silver Picks the Wrong Defense. Sullivan seriously compromised her own credibility in that piece.

Short background: MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had apparently been criticizing Silver’s work (and engaging in personal attacks), so via Twitter Silver bet him $1000 that Obama would win. Nate’s many things — a statistician, a bettor, someone who believes in his own work, a blogger. He’s not a traditional journalist and he’s not a Times reporter who is expected to maintain an appearance of neutrality. Silver’s model shows Obama with a better than 80 percent chance of re-election, so the $1000 bet is a pretty good one (although he could still lose — close to 1/5 of the time).

Sullivan took Silver to task for that bet, which could be fine given the Times’ standards but in practice is really problematic given the hazy definition of Silver’s position.

And it’s the way that Sullivan went about it that I object most strongly too.

She writes:

For months now, he has been predicting that President Obama has about a 75 percent probability, give or take a few points, of winning re-election on Tuesday. He uses an algorithm – some call it a secret sauce — that combines the numbers in public opinion polls and produces a result that he then turns into a prediction.

Since the summer, the model has shown Obama with a lead, but his actual chances of winning on Nov. 6 have varied from 59 percent to 89 percent. That’s hardly “a few points” — and that’s precisely the sort of lazy characterization all too common in news coverage. And that’s precisely the sort of lazy use of numbers that Silver himself would never allow.

And why echo the derisive “secret sauce” complaint? Some mathematical details can’t be released lest Silver undermine his own value, but he’s been exhaustive — really — in explaining over the months what data goes in, how data cycles out, how various weights of information change over time, why some pollsters are weighed more heavily or are adjusted for their partisan “house effect”, and so forth and so on.

Again, Sullivan’s decision to use the derisive “secret sauce” term coupled with her own vague understanding of the model’s methodology insults both Silver and his readership.

And I should add that Silver is not really in the “prediction” racket. He’s determining odds of a particular outcome, not necessarily predicting one.

Sullivan writes:

Itâ€s also inappropriate for a Times journalist, which is how Mr. Silver is seen by the public even though heâ€s not a regular staff member.

“I wouldnâ€t want to see it become newsroom practice,” said the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett. He described Mr. Silverâ€s status as a blogger — something like a columnist — as a mitigating factor.

Granted, Mr. Silver isnâ€t covering the presidential race as a political reporter would.

But he is closely associated with The Times and its journalism – in fact, heâ€s probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment.

FiveThirtyEight’s electoral predictions three days before the election

But consider Sullivan’s formulation: it’s inappropriate for a Times journalist to make a bet on Twitter; therefore it’s inappropriate for a non-staff blogger who is not a reporter but who is a little like a columnist. In an earlier post, executive editor Jill Abramson was quoted as saying that Silver is “a separate entity, somewhat analogous to that of a columnist.”

Really, what the hell?

Sullivan backtracked a bit with a followup post, but she misses the point there too.

A few observations:

Journalists are scared of numbers
Not all of them certainly, but this is a huge problem in news coverage today. For example, if more reporters had understood simple concepts like months of inventory, we would have seen a much better public grasp of the hubris of the housing boom. What Silver is doing at FiveThirtyEight seems to scare people who prefer words over numbers. Silver’s a good writer, a clear writer, but he’s not going to win any awards for his long-winded prose. He uses words to give voice to the data he collects and analyzes. Bill McBride does the same thing at Calculated Risk. Such approaches are challenging to the irrational world of punditry that dominates so much of our public discourse.

The NYT and other legacy media are struggling to adjust to the world of new media
As I note above, the Times clearly needs to figure out exactly what Silver’s content is. If the NYT itself doesn’t know, then how can they possibly criticize him like this based on non-existent standards?

News coverage is biased toward horse races and “tossups”
Romney could still win on Tuesday, but it’s not a tossup. Check out Silver’s post about Friday’s polling: Nov. 2: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased. Of 22 swing state polls (CO, FL, IA, ME-2, MI, MN, NH, OH, VA, WI) released on Friday, two were tied and Obama led in 19 of them. Romney led in one poll in Florida. And that’s not just a single day — Obama has maintained small but steady leads in more than enough states to get to 270 electoral votes. From that post:

If you have just one poll of a state, the statistical sampling error will be fairly high. For instance, a poll of 800 voters has a margin of error in estimating one candidateâ€s vote share of about plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. In a two-candidate race, however, the margin of error in estimating the difference between the candidates (as in: “Obama leads Romney by five points”) is roughly twice that, plus or minus seven percentage points, since a vote for one candidate is necessarily a vote against the other one.

The margin of error is much reduced, however, when you aggregate different polls together, since that creates a much larger sample size. In Ohio, for example, there have been 17,615 interviews of likely voters in polls conducted there within the past 10 days. That yields a margin of error, in measuring the difference between the candidates, of about 1.5 percentage point — smaller than Mr. Obamaâ€s current lead in the polling average there.

Legacy media need to figure this thing out — and fast. For informed news consumers, it’s now almost laughable for media outlets to give focused attention to an individual poll, as major publications and stations do routinely for polls they have commissioned.