Welcome Back, Mr. Silver

The new FiveThirtyEight has launched this week, now with ESPN (let's remember they started out modeling baseball stats), and Prognosticator Supreme Nate Silver explains his site's take on what he calls "data journalism" and what it means for the media landscape.  He starts out confessing that his modeling for the 2012 elections was in fact overrated because other folks came to very similar conclusions about Obama vs Romney, and for one other reason:

The other reason I say our election forecasts were overrated is because they didn’t represent the totality, or even the most important part, of our journalism at FiveThirtyEight. We also covered topics ranging from the increasing acceptance of gay marriage to the election of the new pope, along with subjects in sports, science, lifestyle and economics. Relatively little of this coverage entailed making predictions. Instead, it usually involved more preliminary steps in the data journalism process: collecting data, organizing data, exploring data for meaningful relationships, and so forth. Data journalists have the potential to add value in each of these ways, just as other types of journalists can add value by gathering evidence and writing stories.

The breadth of our coverage will be much clearer at this new version of FiveThirtyEight, which is launching Monday under the auspices of ESPN. We’ve expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas — politics, economics, science, life and sports.

So here's where we are in 2014:  fact-driven journalism is shiny and new, as opposed to endless punditry, opining, spin, and agenda-driven lying.  I can't think of a better person to fill this "niche" than Nate Silver.  Here's wishing him luck.

It's a pretty high bar, and judgement is so far reserved.