While Silver is the head of the operation, Mike Wilson, formerly of the Tampa Bay Times, will oversee all editorial activity as its managing editor. He held the same title at the Tampa Bay Times, previously named the St. Petersburg Times, where he supervised several Pulitzer Prize winning projects.
FiveThirtyEight was founded by Silver in 2008 as his personal blog chronicling the historic election of Barack Obama. His accurate prediction of Obama's victory -- based on Silver's statistical computation of aggregate local polling data nationwide -- drew millions of fans to the site. He accurately predicted the presidential election results of 49 states in 2008 and all 50 states in 2012.
The New York Times then hired Silver on a contract, providing the site a prominent spot on the newspaper's website. While his work generated much buzz and high traffic for the Times' website, Silver and the newspaper went their separate ways after ESPN offered him a new home.
At ESPN, FiveThirtyEight will be redesigned and restructured to include five editorial topics, or "verticals," including sports, politics, economics, science and lifestyle. "Our little 538 corner is going to have a lot of editorial freedom and a lot of 'voice,'" Silver wrote in a Q&A with readers of sports news site Deadspin.com in July. "When we were negotiating with ESPN, they said 'yes' to an awful lot of things, in terms of our vision for the site."
In tapping a uniquely "branded" journalist with a loyal following to create a web channel, ESPN took a similar gamble in enabling sports columnist Bill Simmons to create sports and pop-culture site Grantland. With its long-form writing, sports-geek videos and authoritative voices recruited from newspapers and more established online sites, Grantland has q! uickly differentiated itself from from other ESPN editorial offerings. The sports media giant is seeking to replicate the model with Silver.
"The new FiveThirtyEight will bring more analytics to ESPN's storytelling in a smart and entertaining fashion," said ESPN business development executive Marie Donoghue in a statement.
Other FiveThirtyEight hires announced by ESPN:
* Kate Elazegui, creative director: She will oversee the visual design of FiveThirtyEight and Grantland. She previously worked at Pentagram, New York Magazine and Vanity Fair.
* Carl Bialik, senior writer, news: He will concentrate on "untangling controversies over data and statistics as they arise in the news cycle," ESPN said. He previously wrote The Numbers Guy column at The Wall Street Journal.
* Micah Cohen – senior editor: He will oversee and write for the site's blogs. He who previously worked with Silver on FiveThirtyEight at the New York Times.
* Harry Enten -- senior writer, politics: He will be the site's lead political writer, applying data and statistics "to create differentiating analysis on elections, the behavior of Congress, and other topics," ESPN said. He comes from The Guardian.
* Walter Hickey – senior writer, science and lifestyle: His job is "to demonstrate the value of data, mathematics and statistics in everyday life," ESPN said. He was previously with Business Insider.
"We're building our own Moneyball team," Silver said.
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