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No PR person drove me to write this article. To tell you the truth, it was respect for Nate Silver. I have been following his work since he started PECOTA at Ba

No PR person drove me to write this article. To tell you the truth, it was respect for Nate Silver. I have been following his work since he started PECOTA at Baseball Prospectus. I have barely read any other articles other than a few passing headlines about the hubbub with Scarborough but I figured it would be a decent time to touch on the subject, with his model being critiqued seemingly from all sides. For his baseball work, I am fond of the approach that Silver takes, and his record at politics using similar methods has proven efficient, worth comment. No PR person reached out to me, I was not influenced by other articles outside of what I could see myself on FiveThirtyEight and I have no political agenda. I can speak for no other author, but I wrote this because it was topical and timely and it struck me as an interesting subject.

checkinitout 14y ago
I can accept that, and yet agree with the earlier comment that Silver must have some sort of PR thing going on. I first learned of Silver in early 2008 when he was blogging at DailyKos.com under a pseudonym. I was curious to know who he was, and spent some time to find out that it was Nate Silver - friends who knew on the inside told me. So I went to Google his name, and found his amazing bio at Wikipedia. If you know anything about Wikipedia, you know you're asked to NOT create your own page, but create pages of others. It's not intended to be a site for self-promotion. But someone named "Mack2" had created Silver's page (I just went back to confirm it) and here's what I found curious. One: the page had an inordinate amount of detail, including Silver's high school awards and favorite foods. His page read more like the resume of a recent college graduate - which he was - than a typical Wikipedia article. Two: the information was incredibly detailed and included a comprehensive set of personal data, the sort of over-the-top detail you would expect from a statistician. And very promotional in tone - go find it and look for the "view history" link, see for yourself, it's still there. Three: at the time, the only other pages edited by "Mack2" were pages about baseball statistics, Soviet history (Silver is reportedly Russian), and Silver's company and co-workers. Nothing else. Does that sounds like a disinterested journalist documenting an interesting topic? Hardly. I suspect it was Nate Silver himself, writing his own PR, using a fake name - just like he eventually acknowledged doing at DailyKos.com. I had the sense that Silver was promoting himself there, and I thought he did a fantastic job at it. I'm guessing that once the NY Times picked him up, he may have hired a professional PR agent at that time, or the NY Times got him one - it's a win-win for them, after all. PR agents and journalists go hand-in-hand, any there are individuals who do both, or change jobs from PR to journalism and back - all the time. Not unusual at all. PR is a big aspect of newspaper work and journalism.

checkinitout 14y ago

I can accept that, and yet agree with the earlier comment that Silver must have some sort of PR thing going on. I first learned of Silver in early 2008 when he was blogging at DailyKos.com under a pseudonym. I was curious to know who he was, and spent some time to find out that it was Nate Silver - friends who knew on the inside told me. So I went to Google his name, and found his amazing bio at Wikipedia. If you know anything about Wikipedia, you know you're asked to NOT create your own page, but create pages of others. It's not intended to be a site for self-promotion. But someone named "Mack2" had created Silver's page (I just went back to confirm it) and here's what I found curious. One: the page had an inordinate amount of detail, including Silver's high school awards and favorite foods. His page read more like the resume of a recent college graduate - which he was - than a typical Wikipedia article. Two: the information was incredibly detailed and included a comprehensive set of personal data, the sort of over-the-top detail you would expect from a statistician. And very promotional in tone - go find it and look for the "view history" link, see for yourself, it's still there. Three: at the time, the only other pages edited by "Mack2" were pages about baseball statistics, Soviet history (Silver is reportedly Russian), and Silver's company and co-workers. Nothing else. Does that sounds like a disinterested journalist documenting an interesting topic? Hardly. I suspect it was Nate Silver himself, writing his own PR, using a fake name - just like he eventually acknowledged doing at DailyKos.com. I had the sense that Silver was promoting himself there, and I thought he did a fantastic job at it. I'm guessing that once the NY Times picked him up, he may have hired a professional PR agent at that time, or the NY Times got him one - it's a win-win for them, after all. PR agents and journalists go hand-in-hand, any there are individuals who do both, or change jobs from PR to journalism and back - all the time. Not unusual at all. PR is a big aspect of newspaper work and journalism.