Nate Silver, Data, and Storytelling

[Commentary] For those of us who care about storytelling in the digital age, the question has become how do we create new forms of storytelling that incorporate the quantitative into the qualitative?

Television, frankly, has been awful at this. And sports television in particular has been surprisingly awful at creatively integrating statistics into its coverage. For the most part it has simply littered the screen with scores and tickers—it's done a great job of bringing us multiple streams of real-time information, but it's done a lousy job of using data to bring any new dimension to what we're watching. Nate Silver's arrival at ESPN just might change that. ESPN, which doth bestride the sports world like a colossus, isn't just the biggest sports network in North America, it's also one of the continent's largest news and information companies. When it comes to news and data-gathering ESPN has scale—massive scale—and that ability to capture and parse big data is ESPN's next competitive advantage. At ESPN Nate Silver is potentially an intellectual leader whose presence could be transformative to sports television. At the New York Times, Silver was a prognosticator and a brand, a conjuror who with his FiveThirtyEight.com blog was scarily accurate in predicting the outcomes of elections. That was the sizzle. But the actual steak is that Silver is able to tell stories we can all dine out on using data. That's what's so exciting.