The NYT “announces the deal”:http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/the-new-york-times-to-host-political-polling-site-fivethirtyeight/?src=twt&twt=mediadecodernyt here.
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.
This plausibly says interesting things about where journalism (and, obviously, the _NYT_ in particular), are going. Newspapers have traditionally been highly allergic to statistics, charts and the like, in the belief that they turned readers off. FiveThirtyEight has demonstrated that there is a sort-of-mass readership for this kind of material, if it is presented in the right way. That the _New York Times_ has bought licensed the site – and is seeking to integrate Silver into its broader operations – suggests that it wants to tap into that market.