Nate Silver: 2/3 of America's op-ed columnists are "worthless"

Mona Chalabi writes data-driven story on Nigerian kidnappings. Story necessitates correction to effect of "sorry about that, we don't know how to process data."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/mapping-kidnappings-in-nigeria/

I think we have enough evidence to conclude that this site is poorly written and poorly edited. Silver needs to think about exactly what it is he is trying to sell.

Long-ass correction follows:

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Editor’s note (May 16, 3:35 p.m.): This article contains many errors, some of them fundamental to the analysis.

The article repeatedly refers to the number and location of kidnappings. But the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) — the data source for the article — is a repository of media reports, not discrete events. As such, we should only have referred to “media reports of kidnappings,” not kidnappings.

This mistake led to other problems.

We should not have published an animated map showing “kidnappings” over time, or even “media reports of kidnappings” over time. Because we have no data on actual kidnappings, showing a time series requires normalizing the data to account for the increasing number of media reports overall. Thus, showing individual media reports is a mistake. The second map, showing “Kidnapping rate per 100,000 people, 1982-present,” has the same flaw.

The animated map also incorrectly locates some reported kidnappings. If the location of a reported kidnapping isn’t in a media report, GDELT defaults the location to the center of Nigeria. So that part of the country is overrepresented in the animated map.

The article also should have made clear that while GDELT makes an effort to remove duplicate media reports of the same event, it is not always successful in doing so because media reports often conflict with one another. There were many conflicting reports about the mass kidnapping of hundreds of girls from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok in April. This likely accounts for at least some of the rise in media reports of kidnappings referred to in the last paragraph of the post.

This piece did not meet FiveThirtyEight’s standards for publication. We apologize for the mistakes. We will do better. The original article follows below.

 

There have been a few articles on FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot where the statistical analysis has been suspect. Maybe a summer workshop at the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at Michigan would help.

 

LTL is correct. Silver did not hire great, or in some cases, even decent, writers. Silver himself is average-to-decent writer. This is probably fine -- they'll get better, and it's not that crucial if the data is interesting -- but the site will not be putting lipstick on any pigs with sheer craft. Though pleasure can not be easily measured, it's still a real thing that people experience, and many people like to read good writing. It's worth remembering that the one main reason Bill Simmons rose to the top of the business isn't because of some out-of-the-box thinking. He's as middlebrow as they come. It's because he's funny, and his writing is funny.

So here are some ledes on recent 538 stories:

<i>"Over the past several months, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have been in the headlines."

"The Federal Reserve closely watches data on workers’ wages."

"After a decade of near silence, Monica Lewinsky spoke out Tuesday with a piece in Vanity Fair on her affair with President Bill Clinton."

"On Wednesday night, both the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs closed out their series in five games."

"Everyone knows that a woman’s eggs don’t improve with age."

"During this week’s NFL draft, 32 team executives will select 256 prospects in the most-hyped, most-scrutinized event of its kind."

"Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is clearly thinking about running for president."

"It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s 30th birthday Wednesday."

"On Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times replaced Jill Abramson as editor-in-chief."</i>

I can appreciate that 538 is trying to take real-time events and apply a different kind of journalism to it. But the ledes don't have to read like the worst AP ledes. The work can, on some level, still be <i>artful.</i>

Silver made a faulty (and arrogant) presumption, IMO, that he needed to hire only people whose skillset already tracked with his. What Silver and his staff does -- finding studies, mining data, drawing conclusions, asking questions -- is not a difficult skill to require. Well, it's not. It can be learned, and all it takes is a willingness to learn. Reading the stuff, one conclusion I don't come to, not at all, is "well, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman couldn't do this." They may not want to do it -- and that may be part of the problem -- but they certainly could. Embedding 14 links into a story and interpreting some graphs? Writing a perfunctory "recently, this happened" lede? Many journalists could do that. Silver would have been wiser, at least in a few cases, to hire people who were open to his method, but had been, for example, good feature writers.

 

Two quickie responses, Alma:

* The writing may indeed be mediocre, but it is unfair to cherry pick ledes to make that point. I like those ledes. I dislike clever ledes. Ledes are way overrated.

* David Brooks could not do what 538 does. Not on his greatest day.

 

On the ledes: Throughout the pieces the writing remains more or less at that level of quality. You not only like it, but think it is good. I don't. That's how it goes.

On Brooks: We'll just have to disagree on whether he "could" do it. I'm not a particular fan of his. But "How Americans Like Their Steak?"

 

If so, Barry still needed the "greatest campaign in history" to succeed a president polling around 30 percent in late 2008.
He really isn't the smartest guy ever when others are doing the work for him, is he?

 

EDIT: That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

 

I don't like "writerly" writing. You do.

 

Says the guy who creams over Slate.

 

You don't know what kind of writing I like, actually. At least not from this thread. But I am writing that "In/on (insert timeframe), something happened" is not good writing. You think it is. So be it.

 

Nate Silver's greatest scam was convincing news outlets putting together a few graphs and tables is in-depth data analysis.

 

It is something when you can get dumb people to convince themselves they're smart because they can read one of your graphs.