Star statistician Nate Silver is leaving his home at the New York Times and moving to ESPN to be a part of “Olbermann,” the new Keith Olbermann show on Disney’s ESPN 2 channel. Silver, best known for accurately predicting almost exactly the results of both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, created and runs the popular FiveThirtyEight blog, which he has licensed to the Times. That contract expires next month.
Keith Olbermann has been a bit of a mystery since his contract at Current TV was terminated after little more than a year. He anchored the highly-successful “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” show on MSNBC from 2003 to 2011, until MSNBC ended his contract apparently without notice. “Countdown” was a galvanizing clarion call for progressives, and Olbermann is credited with the rise of Rachel Maddow, now the network’s top anchor.
Both Olbermann and Silver share a love of sports. Olbermann got his start in sports journalism, where he made a name for himself over a two-decade period. Olbermann worked for both ESPN and Fox Sports.
Silver came to prominence as a “baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform in the future,” according to an article today in the New York Times announcing the move:
At ESPN, Mr. Silver is expected to have a wide-ranging portfolio. Along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to “Olbermann,†the late-night ESPN2 talk show hosted by Keith Olbermann that will have its debut at the end of August. In political years, he will also have a role at ABC News, which is owned by Disney.
It is unknown if Silver will continue his political statistical work publicly, and Olbermann’s ESPN contract prohibits him from covering politics.
Silver is the author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don’t, and was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time.
(Evil Laugh) RT @TJ22Hatter In re: Nate Silver. Well Played @KeithOlbermann, Well Played
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) July 20, 2013
Images: Keith Olbermann via Twitter, Nate Silver by Jack Newton via Wikimedia
I don’t want to invoke ancient (07-08) history but Nate Silver pretty much started on tv on Countdown. This is not entirely new (evil laugh)
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) July 20, 2013
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