August 5th, 2013
A very smart and interesting set of observations from Colby Cosh:
Silver’s fans suspect that the real grievance of the old Times hands is that our hero got ahead and stayed ahead of the news cycle using nothing more than mathematics, a language that might as well be Old Church Slavonic as far as 19 of 20 journalists are concerned. The Silverites may be on to something, although it should be said that the New York Times employs and publishes the world’s best data visualization specialists, and I do mean the world’s best: the U.S. Army, the Fortune 500, and the European Union combined couldn’t lick them, although the National Postmight make them hustle right up to the finish line. The Times’ data artists did a lot to make the paper’s election coverage a success, and this included making Silver’s own work more reader-friendly. They didn’t get invited onto The Daily Show for it.
For better or worse, Silver is an independent media power now, a man who has dragged his own audience from place to place as it increases inexorably. He is said to have been recruited to ESPN with the help of Bill Simmons, who is becoming one of the defining figures of a media era. Simmons started his own “Boston Sports Guy” website in 1997 with little more than a decent sense of humour, a short but blessed lifetime of watching the Celtics at the Garden, and a bookish lad’s deep knowledge of the canon of American sports books, sports magazine articles, and sports movies, both fictional and documentary. In 2013 he is an honest-to-God magnate: bestselling author, NBA television commentator, hands-on executive producer of his own superb documentary series.
He still plunks references to 1979 basketball movie Fast Break into his columns three times a month, yet there is every likelihood that the man will win an Oscar within the next five to ten years. A Pulitzer is not entirely out of the question. The words “only in America” are called for one-thousandth as often as they are uttered, but Simmons’ career demands them.
ESPN wisely decided two years ago to turn Simmons loose on his own ESPN-owned website—Grantland.com, effectively an independent online magazine edited by Simmons. Indeed, they periodically cram the whole thing between covers and print it as a dead-tree magazine. The corporation did for Simmons what is hardest for corporations to do, and relented on its instinct for corporate homogeneity: Grantland has its own freestanding URL—you don’t have to go to http://espn.com/content/grantland or anything to find it—and its own distinct design. The site publishes much of the best sportswriting now being executed in the United States, but it covers pop culture well, too: it has room for pretty much everything but electoral politics, which, it occurs to me, might actually be one unstated secret to Simmons’ success.
By all means, read the whole thing.
-
Imagine Earth 2’s Nate Silver working for FNC rather than the NYT…it boggles the mind…
Joe Sixpack August 11, 2013 at 8:37 pm
Statistics is to math the way political science is to real science.