Silver out at 538

The Hollywood Reporter reports:

The second round of Disney layoffs hit ABC News on Tuesday, with Nate Silver’s data-driven politics and journalism brand FiveThirtyEight among those being impacted.

Silver told FiveThirtyEight employees in a Slack message that he expects to leave Disney when his contract is up, which he added would be “soon,” The Hollywood Reporter has learned. 

ABC News is expected to keep the FiveThirtyEight brand name, with plans to streamline the site and make it more efficient.

I didn’t realise Silver had sold the brand name to ABC/Disney. Previously he retained rights to it, so when he left the NY Times, it left with him.

I am a huge fan of Silver. His data driven approach has changed journalism in the US for the better. I read 538 many times a week and listen to their twice weekly podcast.

I can’t imagine I will visit often, if at all, with Silver gone. And if he sees up a new entity, I am highly likely to subscribe to that.

As a pollster myself, I have learnt a lot listening to Silver talk about his predictive models, and how polls feed into that, but also his use of non polling data.