BuzzFeed | The Atlantic | Business Insider | The Washington Post
BuzzFeed's new White House reporter pumps his colleagues for information on how to run the beat. "It can be frustrating and soul-killing to listen to the same talking points and spin sessions day after day," New York Times reporter Peter Baker tells Evan McMorris-Santoro. (Is there a "House of Cards" paragraph? Try to write this piece without one!)

Baker says the job is "only stenography if you choose it to be," and that "the challenge is to be creative not just in uncovering information the press office doesn't want to give out, but also in taking the information that is available and writing about it in a way that goes deeper below the surface and gives readers a better, sharper analysis of what's really going on."

"The best way to cover the White House is not to cover the White House," Yahoo's Olivier Knox tells McMorris-Santoro. (more...)

Ben Zauzmer may be the Nate Silver of the Oscars. The Harvard sophomore talks with Ellen Killoran about the glitziest gig a statistician can get: Predicting the Oscars. Zauzmer says it's likely Daniel Day-Lewis will win Best Actor, that "Searching for Sugar Man" will win Best Documentary and that "Brave" "is pretty close to being a lock" for Best Animated Feature. Zauzmer "compiled all of the significant award shows (e.g. BAFTAs), the guild awards (e.g. Writers’ Guild Awards), any corresponding Oscar nominations (e.g. Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing)" plus Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores to arrive at his numbers.

"I'd love to see 'Les Mis' pull off Best Picture, but I know it's not going to happen," Zauzmer tells Killoran. He picks "Argo."

• Nate Silver may also be the Nate Silver of the Oscars. His model weights more heavily "insider" awards like those given by the Director's Guild of America, whose members share membership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, over those by the Golden Globes, which are voted on by journalists.

The short version: our forecasts for the Academy Awards are based on which candidates have won other awards in their category. We give more weight to awards that have frequently corresponded with the Oscar winners in the past, and which are voted on by people who will also vote for the Oscars. We don’t consider any statistical factors beyond that, and we doubt that doing so would provide all that much insight.

He tips "Argo" as Best Picture. (more...)

Reddit
Superstar blogger Nate Silver took questions on Reddit Tuesday. One user asked him whether he found sports or politics "more frustrating to analyze." Politics, Silver replied: "Between the pundits and the partisans, you're dealing with a lot of very delusional people."

Another Redditor asked him how much he enjoyed "getting the ire of pundits."

"At some point in the last few weeks of the election, I guess I decided to lean into the upside outcome a little bit in terms of pushing back at the pundits in my public appearances -- as opposed to emphasizing the uncertainty in the model, as I had for most of the year," Silver replied. (more...)

Dave Winer | The Guardian | The New York Times
We all know Nate Silver killed punditry last week. What else has he bumped off lately?

• Negative advertising, Dave Winer writes. Also voter suppression, and the idea one can get elected without building a "private Facebook" like Obama's data operation:

You could argue that Obama's network is even more valuable than Zuck's. Maybe this is his Presidential library, or his version of the Carter Center or the Clinton Global Initiative. Only this time you might call it ObamaBook. The ultimate political machine.

(more...)

Yes, today's rather important for President Obama and Mitt Romney, as well as their families and supporters. But New York Times poll-blogger Nate Silver's predictions have made him a target for the ire of conservatives and pundits protecting their turf as well as a sort of sex symbol for math nerds and others who insist Silver's data-based approach represents a bright and alternate future for political reporting. “I know as a matter of practice that I’m going to have more opportunities if my prediction looks good and fewer if it doesn’t,” Silver told The Washington Post's Erik Wemple. On this, he and his critics agree. (more...)

FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight.com founder and New York Times staffer Nate Silver delivered the Henry Pringle Lecture to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism graduates last week. He told them:

* Read everything, including academic papers, which Silver says many journalists miss. Some 
academics 
don't 
know
 how
 to
 write,
 but 
a 
few
 of 
them 
do,
 and 
there's
 a 
lot 
of 
wisdom 
there
 once 
you 
get
 used
 to 
parsing
 through 
the language.
"

* Learn 
how
 to 
be
 entrepreneurial. It's
 important 
to
 develop 
a 
sense
 of
 yourself
 as 
a
 brand
‐‐
don't 
let
 yourself
 become
 defined
 too 
narrowly
 because 
that
 will 
limit
 your
 opportunities 
as
 your 
career
 evolves.
"

* Learn how to make an argument. "
The 
reader
 is
 going
 to
 be 
asking
 you
 to
 develop a hypothesis, weigh the evid
ence, and come to some conclusion about it -- it's really very much analogous to the scientific method. Good journalism has always done this -- but now it needs to be done more explicitly."

* Learn how to work with data and statistics. "Statistics, to anyone who knows anything about them, aren't factoids -- 4 out of 5 dentists agree that Colgate is the best toothpaste, Uganda is the 118th most populous country -- but instead quanta of information that can be pieced together, just like all the other information that you collect as a journalist, to help you write stories and inform others about the world.

> Couric tells Boston U. grads: “Social networking is no substitute for being social"