So Ezra Klein, who has been singled out on this blog for praise for _actually calculating politicians’ DW-NOMINATE scores_ (a first in opinion journalism, shurely), is moving to the Washington Post. And not only that, but they seem to be hiring him _because_ of his interest in the more data-driven side of things. From an email:
bq. The really decisive moment for me was when they said, “the thing we really like that you do is post those charts and dig through long pdfs to find important facts.” You like my, my, my…boring side!
Maybe things are changing in the opinion business.
Update: Matt Yglesias vigorously disputes my timeline via email.
bq. I like Ezra fine, but I must object to the notion that he’s a pioneering user of DW-NOMINATE scores in a punditry context. Here I was in late 2006 and here’s my friend Sam Rosenfeld even earlier. The credit, I think, belongs to Jordan Ellenberg for first introducing the journalism world to this data though I believe I learned it from Brendan Nyhan.
[I’ve integrated the hyperlinks in Matt’s email but otherwise left it unchanged]
Good stuff! – this is the kind of journalistic bragging match that political scientists can really get behind.