I’m keeping a close eye on two new ventures in journalism – 538 and Ezra Klein’s Project X. I have obvious reasons for keeping on eye these projects. Are these places that will be friendly to untraditional writers? It’s important to me as a news junkie consumer of news and as an occasional writer.
Project X seems to be hiring younger, but traditional types of writers. Nate Silver is going in another direction. He’s looking for people with serious quantitative chops. In an article for Time, Silver talks about his methods of hiring writers. In particular he wants to avoid the types that write op-ed articles for the major newspapers. He calls them the “crap quadient.”
“Two-thirds of the op-ed columnists at America’s major newspapers are worthless,” Silver says. He hates punditry, he hates narratives, he hates bold proclamations — and so too does he hate the media’s most willing vessels for all three.
I still think that the problem with opinion writers is the life-time career track. One year and move on.
Apt. 11d 
Does he pay more than universities?
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Do they have a strategery for the Revotionalization?
Some op-ed-sters people run out of gas after year one, some are still interesting after years and years. MoDo is a one trick pony, for sure. Brooks keeps coming up with interesting stuff – at least interesting to me – couple-three times a month. Tom Friedman is on the down slope.
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I get the Nate Silver issue that people talking about trends and events and history and the future need a lot more quantification and facts on their side. I talk about this xkcd comic a lot:
http://xkcd.com/904/
Sports journalism
“A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers.”
“Let’s use them to build narratives!”
But then, the article goes on to describe ooohh, a graph, that plots quantitative to qualitative (what, ability, performance, ?, and by whom) on a two dimensional axis as the basis of his hiring. Does that mean that NS makes NS pundit proclamation about an individuals quantitative/qualitative point on his graph and then hires on that basis? (I hope not, and maybe the behind the paywall ESPN article says something different). I hate anecdotal pundit journalism, but I might hate fake quantitative analysis (and mysterious data analysis, where a series of unknown variables goes into a “qualitative” index and then gets plotted as a point on a graph) even more.
I personally rank Sam Wang (Princeton Election Consortium) way higher than Nate Silver on the quantitative graph. I wonder how the two fare under Silver’s ranking?
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