Interesting announcement from The New York Times:
The New York Times said Thursday that it would begin hosting the popular blog FiveThirtyEight and make its founder, Nate Silver, a regular contributor to the newspaper and the Sunday magazine.
Mr. Silver, a statistical wizard, became a bonafide media star during the last presidential election season for his political projections based on dissections of polling data. He retains all rights to FiveThirtyEight and will continue to run it himself, but "under the banner and auspices of NYTimes.com," The Times said in a news release. The arrangement is similar to one The Times struck with the authors of the blog Freakonomics in 2007.
What this -- along with developments like The Washington Post snagging Ezra Klein from us here at TAP -- shows is that in their efforts to navigate the evolving media world, at least some august publications are widening their horizons a bit, to embrace forms of content and voices that just a couple of years ago they probably thought were beneath them. Will this start happening more and more? We can hope so. When The New York Times does it, other Old Media outlets are likely to follow.
-- Paul Waldman
