Crunching the numbers still a judgment call

Last Monday, Nate Silver re-launched his website, fivethirtyeight.com, writing a lengthy manifesto to accompany the new-look site, which features an equally lengthy list of new writers.

That’s big news in certain circles: Silver is the king of data journalism, the ultimate number-cruncher, and his manifesto, meandering though it was, reflected that in its withering disdain for opinion-based journalism.

Those opinion-based journalists haven’t been slow to hit back — one landed a fair, if somewhat personal, blow when asking how Silver positions himself as a maverick outsider when he moved from the New York Times to ESPN — but the general point of retaliation about Silver and his website is a simple one: even data- or statistic-based journalism comes coloured by opinion, surely.