In an excerpt from a story about Nate Silver’s planned relaunch of FiveThirtyEight.com, Jack Dickey writes about Silver’s hiring practices. Silver graphs potential employees:
The bottom two quadrants belong to the dregs of American journalism: on the left, sportswriters who cherry-pick statistics without thinking through them, and on the right, op-ed columnists. “That’s the crap quadrant. Two-thirds of the op-ed columnists at America’s major newspapers are worthless,” Silver says. He hates punditry, he hates narratives, he hates bold proclamations — and so too does he hate the media’s most willing vessels for all three.
