What Should fivethirtyeight.com Do?: Thursday Dutch Uncle Weblogging Advice
A correspondent writes, apropos of http://fivethirtyeight.com:
Nate Silver's extraordinary and unique excellence is to take a look at a complicated but relatively unsophisticated spreadsheet model of a situation and then, every day, telling an excellent narrative story about a piece of the model. That is the way that http://fivethirtyeight.com could be a huge success. But he seems to be following a different strategy. The stories are more:
Here is some data, here is how we built it, here is the chart, here is an interesting fact about the chart...
That is unlikely to get Nate to where he wants to be, and should be...
I think this is insightful. If I were Nate Silver, therefore, I would focus on building a relatively small number of quantitative models of complicated situations, and then turn my energy to successfully telling a series of narrative stories about each of them...
