Disney lets go of Nate Silver, “The Statistical Wizard” – El Sol de México

Nate Silver, fundador de FiveThirtyEightand part of the data-driven news site’s 35-person team are leaving ABC News as part of a series of layoffs at The Walt Disney Companyas reported by Sarah Scire and Laura Hazard at NiemanLab.

Silver said Tuesday that he hopes to leave the sports and politics news site. when his contract expires this summer.

Several other members of the team FiveThirtyEight, including deputy managing editor Chadwick Matlinthe sports editor Neil Paine, the senior audience editor Meena Ganesan, senior science reporter Maggie Koerth (and 2015 Nieman Fellow), Business Operations Manager Vanessa Diaz and senior designer Emily Scherer, announced that they were also affected by the layoffs.

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FiveThirtyEight, named after him number of voters in the United States Electoral College, has its roots in the section “Community” from the liberal news site Daily Koswhere, in 2007, a 29 year old baseball statistician named Nate Silver began writing posts about the 2008 US presidential election under the username “Poblano”.

Silver launched FiveThirtyEight as her own blog in March 2008 and in the general election dand that year, their model correctly predicted outcomes in 49 of the 50 statesas well as the winners of the 50 US Senate races.

Wonderful early coverage of Silver’s work often invoked magic. “Silver’s box of tricks sounds bewildering, as it is full of talk of regressions, half-lives and Monte Carlo analysis,” The Guardian editorial board wrote in 2008. The New York Times, announcing his “partnership” with FiveThirtyEight in 2010, he referred to Silver as a “statistical wizard”. FiveThirtyEight quickly became a great traffic generator for the Timeswhere his presence provided fuel for then-publisher Margaret Sullivan.

In 2013, Silver left The New York Times (Sullivan also wrote about it) and brought FiveThirtyEight to ESPN. under mat companyriz disney, transferred from ESPN a ABC News en 2018, as ESPN sought to distance itself from political commentary, and has operated from there ever since.

When Silver leaves ABC News, will leave behind the trade name FiveThirtyEight, but his models will go with him. “The models are licensed to them and the term of the license is concurrent with my contract,” he confirmed to NiemanLab in a message. “They have limited rights to some models after the license expires, but not to core election predictions.”

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Van Scott, vice president of advertising for ABC News, said in a statement that ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a central focus on politics, economics and investigative reporting. “This streamlined structure will allow us to be more aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond.”