Confessions Of A Former Enuretic

This poor old blogger was in pit of despair yesterday. Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe sneered at Nervous Nellies in the ranks as "Bedwetters.". The yammering of the Lamestream Media about the razor-thin difference between the POTUS 44 and Big Love persuaded this blogger that all was lost. The sole glimmer of optimism came from the NY Fishwrap's polling statistics maven, Nate Silver, who predicted that the POTUS was a lock to win the election. The Lamestream Media hyped Big Love for viewers and readers. Nate Silver was a sole voice proclaiming the truth of the 2012 election. If this is a (fair & balanced) corrective to political enuresis, so be it.

[x TNR]
Nate Silver Is A One-Man Traffic Machine For The (NY) Times
By Marc Tracy

Tag Cloud of the following article

alexa appear astoundingly better blog comes contractor coverage detractors drawing earlier editor figure fivethirtyeight forecast high-profile included increased jill marc moment month nate past percent percentage period political public referral role significant silver site staffer supporters terms times timesman took traffic traffic-driver visitors visits week whole writer year yesterday york

created at TagCrowd.com

(Click to embiggen)

“FiveThirtyEight is drawing huge traffic,” New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson told me yesterday. She added, “What’s interesting is a lot of the traffic is coming just for Nate.”

There has been plenty of controversy over Nate Silver’s presidential forecast, which currently reports a roughly nine-in-ten chance of a Barack Obama victory, down slightly from this morning. But supporters and detractors have at least one thing in common: they all visit his site. And so have many, many others over the past weeks and months. During the highest-profile period for the New York Times’ political coverage—and perhaps the newspaper as a whole—Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, which the Times licensed for three years and began hosting in the summer of 2010, plays an astoundingly outsize role in the paper’s online political coverage, at least measured by page views. It suggests that even though Silver is a long-term contractor rather than a staff writer, the Times is closely associated with his forecasts, and therefore could itself come in for much of the criticism Silver has.

The Times does not release traffic figures, but a spokesperson said yesterday that Silver’s blog provided a significant—and significantly growing, over the past year—percentage of Times pageviews. This fall, visits to the Times’ political coverage (including FiveThirtyEight) have increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of site visits. But FiveThirtyEight’s growth is staggering: where earlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of politics visits included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent.

But Silver’s blog has buoyed more than just the politics coverage, becoming a signifiant traffic-driver for the site as a whole. Earlier this year, approximately 1 percent of visits to the New York Times included FiveThirtyEight. Last week, that number was 13 percent. Yesterday, it was 20 percent. That is, one in five visitors to the sixth-most-trafficked U.S. news site took a look at Silver’s blog.

According to Alexa, a Web information company, “538” is the eighth-most searched-for term that led visitors to the Times last month. And over the previous month, it grew more than any other referral term; other increasingly relevant terms were “nate silver” and “538.com.” Notably, no other Times staffers or brands appear on Alexa's lists of top referral terms or rising referral terms.

This might be what Times public editor Margaret Sullivan had in mind last week when she called Silver “probably (and please know that I use the p-word loosely) its most high-profile writer at this particular moment.” If Silver’s status as a contractor is a “mitigating factor” when it comes time to enforce ethics rules, such as the discouragement of betting on political outcomes, then the Times might be better off with Silver as a full-time staffer. In the public eye, he is a Timesman already—in fact, at this moment, it would appear he is the Timesman. Ω

[Marc Tracy is a reporter for The New Republic. He formerly wrote for Tablet, where he edited The Scroll, for which he won a National Magazine Award for Blogging in 2011. He graduated from Columbia University in 2007. Tracy co-edited the anthology Jewish Jocks (2012) with Franklin Foer.]

Copyright Ä 2012 The New Republic

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.


Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2012 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves