FiveThirtyEight, a data-driven journalism organization: making data journalism cool

Nate Silver is a name that I learned and then forgot. He earned a lot of repute after predicting the results of the 2012 election with near perfection. Many praised it as miraculous, an accomplishment against all odds, but Silver says it was all just data.

"Certainly we had a good night. But [the prediction] was and remains a tremendously overrated accomplishment... It wasn't all that hard to figure out that President Obama, ahead in the overwhelming majority of nonpartisan polls in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Iowa and Wisconsin, was the favorite to win them, and was therefore the favorite to win the Electoral College.

Instead our forecasts stood out in comparison to others in the mainstream media."

And it is because of Silver's discontent with some of the practices of the mainstream media that he is striking out with a venture in the field of data journalism.

FiveThirtyEight is the relaunch of Nate Silver's data-driven coverage with the backing of ESPN. The new site launched today (March 17) and, for a WordPress site, looks fantastic. Silver promises a broad coverage of topics in their subsections: politics, economics, science, life and sports.

FiveThirtyEight is now working with a team of 20 journalists. Silver says that though they're big on data, not all of their reporting will be driven by gritty statistics.

"By no means do we think that everything can be broken down into a formula or equation. On the contrary, one of our roles will be to critique incautious uses of statistics when they arise elsewhere in news coverage. At other times, we'll explore ways the consumers can use data to their advantage to level the playing field against corporations and governments."