Nate Silver Out at ABC News as Disney Layoffs Once Again Hit News Division

It's hard to envision the FiveThirtyEight brand without Nate Silver being involved in it. I know they are going to keep it going as a stats-driven site, but so much of it was built on Nate's original and unique approach to data.

According to Clare Malone on Twitter [1], he apparently has only licensed his models to FiveThirtyEight. The license expires around the same time his contract does, at which point he's free to take them with him and start another election/sports forecasting business I suppose?

[1] https://twitter.com/ClareMalone/status/1650905245793304578#m

I am really disappointed to hear this news - by the sounds of it their entire office was gutted by layoffs. I have to say that as someone who follows politics, 538 is a unique source of insightful and data driven political coverage without wading into the mindless editorialism that plagues other major publications. Their coverage during election seasion is consistently fantastic and they've had a great long-running podcast covering lots of political topics as well as diving into how they model election forecasting.

Silver has publicly mentioned several times he hates covering politics and sounds like he will be taking his forecasting models with him once his contract expires. There are other news sites taking similar data-driven approaches but I've never found them to have as much transparency or volume of rich discussion as 538 has over the years. And of course his popular election forecasts are pretty much the gold standard.

Massive loss for political journalism if Silver chooses to walk away from politics as a result of this.

"Oh no."

In the best timeline, this forces Silver to return, humbled, to what he is genuinely talented at. One silver lining (ha ha HAH!) to the death of Twitter has been a marked drop in my incidental unsought exposure to Dunning-Kruger punditry gone off the rails.