Is ESPN’s Nate Silver Concerned About FiveThirtyEight’s Future?

By Brian Flood 

ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight editor in chief Nate Silver is featured in Adweek, where he discusses the differences between The New York Times and ESPN, if he’s ever been censored and his thoughts on Donald Trump‘s chances of winning the GOP nomination. Silver says, “they’re [ESPN] aware that I am sometimes going to critique other news organizations if I think their campaign coverage is not as empirical as it could be.”

Are you worried about the future of FiveThirtyEight after seeing how ESPN scrapped Grantland?
No. I think digital journalism is a challenging business, period. But we have a lot of things going for us. One is that we have a really nice growth trajectory as far as our graphic goes. It’s grown up a lot and we’ve shown that there is some scale. I also think the quality of what we’re doing is pretty good. There are definitely several stories per week now on the site that I am very proud of. Because ESPN is used to thinking about the long term, they told us very explicitly to “take a year and a half to kind of get your feet underneath you and focus on quality.” We were really sad to see Grantland go. They were kind of our colleagues, but we think we’re on a pretty good trajectory ourselves.

Did ESPN discuss it with you before they announced the closing of Grantland?
Sure, I got a little bit of a heads-up. Not a lot of heads-up but a little bit to prepare my staff.

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