Photo: Courtesy FiveThirtyEight.Updated: Well, it took a bit there, but the new FiveThirtyEight is finally live.
Did we ever tell you we're stat geeks? Well, actually, we didn't used to be stat geeks. Nate Silver did that to us. It's one of the many things about him that make us still believe he's a witch, despite some evidence to the contrary.
This is why we're constantly refreshing our browsers today for the long-awaited relaunch of his FiveThirtyEight blog, which is, in theory, supposed to hit our screens today. If you don't remember, The New York Times hosted FiveThirtyEight during that heady period when Silver and his stat-crunching team pretty much predicted the entire 2012 election within a few points of variance. That, plus his ability to pull out interesting, gee-whiz facts out of numbers regarding all sorts of things from the world of politics, social change, sports, entertainment, and food made Silver a burning hot property, one that ESPN was only happy to poach.
According to Silver in a New York magazine article posted this morning, the new site, backed by ESPN in the same way that Grantland is, will feature more "lifestyle" elements. Basically, it's going to be more addictive than it already was. Said Silver, "We are repositioning FiveThirtyEight away from being a politics site. It’s a data journalism site." Fun!
Now, as to when it will launch — we just refreshed our browser again — it could be any minute now. Said Silver in the same interview about finally unveiling it today, "That’s certainly the plan. The thinking here is we’re 75 or 80% ready, but the thing is, if we waited another month, we’d still just be 80 or 85% ready." Yeah, we feel you, man. Keep checking FiveThirtyEight for its first post and click over to Daily Intelligencer to hear more about the new site from Silver himself. (New York Magazine)