AUSTIN, Texas — Data whiz and nerd demigod Nate Silver revealed a slew of details about his site FiveThirtyEight's new home on ESPN during a conversation with Grantland's Bill Simmons here at SXSW on Saturday afternoon.
The biggest piece of news was that FiveThirtyEight will launch on March 17, just in time for college basketball's annual March Madness tournament.
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The basketball bonanza should be a perfect stage for FiveThirtyEight to show off its data-heavy approach to sports journalism after Silver surged to mainstream prominence during the 2012 presidential elections. But despite its ESPN parent, don't expect too much sports from the site's new incarnation.
Silver said FiveThirtyEight will launch with five verticals — sports, politics, economics, science and lifestyle — and probably devote "30% or something" to sports.
Silver and ESPN sent shockwaves through the media landscape in July of 2013 when he left the New York Times for ESPN, taking the FiveThirtyEight brand with him. He rose to celebrity status in November 2012 after perfectly predicting that year's presidential election. FiveThirtyEight was a Times blog, but will be a standalone site on ESPN.
Silver also told Simmons more about why he left the Times for ESPN. He said he didn't want to be a "Thomas Friedman-esque figure," where you have a big personal brand, but aren't building anything bigger or more entrepreneurial. ESPN, Silver said, also seemed more eager to act on his idea for a new site, and legacy media companies such as the Times and Washington Post "want to have their names on everything."
FiveThirtyEight will be called simply that when it relaunches on March 17. Simmons was a columnist for ESPN.com before spinning out Grantland in 2011. Silver said his site will resemble Grantland in at least one aspect: Favoring more thoughtful content and not seeing web publishing as simply a "speed and volume medium."
Silver said he had talks of differing seriousness with between eight and 12 media companies after deciding he wanted to expand FiveThirtyEight. He also said the year following his 2012 triumph was frustrating in some ways as he traveled a total of 180,000 miles while leading the life of a "public intellectual," but not actually "learning anything."
The new site has hired 20 people so far, including what Silver called a "very quantitative, kind of geeky team of writers." One of FiveThirtyEight's biggest initial challenges, he said, is finding editors who can help those writers relay their wonky thoughts in a digestible way for the general public.
Reflecting on his own experience running Grantland so far, Simmons emphasized the value of failure. He said the site looks to publications that didn't make it, citing a sports page called The National by name, for inspiration just as much as it models itself after successful sites. He said that philosophy also trickles down to Grantland's stable of talented writers; it's better to let someone you believe in fail trying a big project rather than herd them away to something less ambitious.
Media watchers playing close attention probably noticed that a new fox logo appeared on FiveThirtyEight's Twitter account recently. Silver said it holds special significance for his new site's philosophy:
The Fox knows many little things; The hedgehog knows one big thing. http://t.co/GWSmHaatPD http://t.co/4s6rNpp5zi
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) March 8, 2014
In that parable, the hedgehog views the world in a simple fashion, with one big defining truth. But the fox sees a world of nuance, a world that can be approached from multiple angles and contains multiple truths from multiple perspectives.
That's what Silver says you can expect from his new FiveThirtyEight, starting March 17.

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