Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Nate Silver - The future of journalism?

Glenn Greenwald has created The Intercept. Nate Silver has left the NYTs to join ESPN where he is editor-in-chief of the FiveThirtyEight site. Bill Keller has left the NYTs to create a blog on the criminal justice system. Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) is launching a new venture with Vox Media. Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) has said: "We’re at an excitingly early stage in working out how to best produce and provide news in a social world." I looked at Greenwald and his new enterprise here. Ezra Klein is who I want to look at in more detail. This is what Klein has said of his new venture:

"We are just at the beginning of how journalism should be done on the web. We really wanted to build something from the ground up that helps people understand the news better. We are not just trying to scale Wonkblog, we want to improve the technology of news, and Vox has a vision of how to solve some of that.

Nate Silver - Be The Fox, Be A Polymath

Nate Silver, he's the man. Statistician, forecaster, consummate polymath and self-professed fox. A fox because "the fox knows many things." What's special about Nate Silver, who calls theFiveThirtyEight blog on the New York Times his online home, is that he takes a big-picture approach to using statistical tools in his analysis of politics.

Nate Silver rejects much of the mainstream, conventional statistical ideology and method taught in colleges and universities today. Like Michael Oakeshott’s practical cook, Nate Silver is a practical statistician who demands less theory, less hypothesizing and more on-the-ground understanding of how baseball, poker, elections and other uncertain processes work.

His philosophy as a fox is that multi-disciplined polymaths are superior to technocrat, single-subject specialists. His idea is that various skills serve each other well in a positive feedback loop. To find out more about Nate Silver I've transcribed some of the most salient aspects of his discussion with Charlie Rose which you can watch in full, above andhere.

Charlie Rose asked Nate: "What are your core competences?"

Nate Silver responded:

"It’s the combination of knowing about statistics but also being a good storyteller. Here’s a topic where the numbers are really dry; but no, it’s pretty interesting if you actually think through things in the right way. It doesn’t mean creating false certainty but talking about where the forecast is coming from and not just throwing up numbers and leaving the environment.