Mediagazer: In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions (Zeynep Tufekci/Wired)

7:45 PM ET, November 3, 2012

Top News:

Why political journalists can't stand Nate Silver: The limits of journalistic knowledge — The more I think about the rift between political journalism and Nate Silver, the more it seems that it's one that's fundamentally an issue of epistemology — how journalists know what they know.

Discussion: Works Cited, @greenfield64, Splice Today, Salon, The Atlantic Online, FAIR Blog, Gawker.com, The Week, HBR.org and Deadspin.com Updates

Zeynep Tufekci / Wired:

In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions — Nate Silver. Photo: Brian Finke — Nate Silver analyzes poll data on the influential FiveThiryEight blog at the New York Times. He crunches polls and other data in an electoral statistical model …

Discussion: PointOfLaw Forum, Mashable! and Brad DeLong

Margaret Sullivan / The Public Editor's Journal:

The Times's Washington Bureau Chief, and Legions of Others, in Defense of Nate Silver — Nate Silver, author of the FiveThirtyEight blog on NYTimes.com, may be under attack from some people, as I noted in a post on Thursday but he also has many defenders. — Hundreds of them wrote to me in e-mails …

Discussion: Mediaite, LA Observed, The Onion, election, CJR, Erik Wemple, @fivethirtyeight and PandoDaily

Politico:

Journalists open wallets for Obama and Romney — Reporters for Romney? Editors for Obama? — Numerous journalists — self-identified reporters, editors and photographers affiliated with established news organizations — contributed money in September and October to the campaigns of President Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

Discussion: @darlin and @escarry

Michelle Atagana / memeburn:

CNN's head of social news: Twitter forces journos to report the news better — CNN accounted for about 13% of all social media mentions, according to trend analytics firm Trendrr earlier this year. That's impressive. Cable News Network is one of the largest news networks in the world …

Dan Nosowitz / Popular Science:

Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia — Ken Mampel, an unemployed, 56-year-old Floridian, is in large part the creator of the massive Hurricane Sandy Wikipedia page. He's also the reason that, for nearly a week, the page had no mention of climate change.

Discussion: The Verge, Gizmodo.com Updates and Gawker.com

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

PRSS aims to be a low-cost iPad magazine factory in the cloud — By launching their own iPad-only travel magazine, TRVL, in September 2010, entrepreneur Michel Elings and photographer and writer Jochem Wijnands garnered glowing reviews and a shout-out from Apple SVP Eddy Cue.

Edward Jay Epstein / CJR:

What journalists miss about the movie business — The vast preponderance of news reporting about Hollywood concerns the weekly box-office race. It is offered free to the media every Sunday afternoon by Nielsen EDI at a low point in its news cycle, packaged with punning headlines and quotes …

Sarah Marshall / Journalism.co.uk:

Curated video world news iPad app launches — Link TV World News offers videos from 125 sources, including Associated Press, Al Jazeera and the Telegraph, and encourages ‘social activism’ — A world news video app has launched for iPad which offers video coverage of breaking international news …

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable and The Huffington Post

Derrick Harris / GigaOM:

MIT researcher says he can predict Twitter trends — A researcher at MIT claims to have developed an algorithm that can accurately predict what topics will trend on Twitter. But Twitter being a relatively minor business in the grand scheme of things, the algorithm might end up being more useful elsewhere …

Discussion: BetaNews, Engadget, Guardian and Poynter

Angela Watercutter / Wired:

Updated Anonymous Doc We Are Legion Gets Online Release — We Are Legion explores the history of Anonymous and traces the hacktivist group's influence on current political movements. — Photo courtesy Luminant Media — It's amazing the Anonymous documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists ever saw the light of day.

Discussion: Softpedia News

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Kobo expands to South Africa to compete against Kindle — Ebook retailer Kobo announced its first African launch Tuesday evening: The company is partnering with South African retail chain Pick n Pay to sell the Kobo Touch e-reader and ebooks. Kobo promises local content available in Afrikaans and English.

Erik Maza / WWD:

Chris Anderson to Exit Wired — With presidential politics and Hurricane news dominating the day's headlines, Friday could have scarcely been a better day to bury bombshell media announcements. And so it was that Condé Nast ceo Chuck Townsend said Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson …

Discussion: Style Ledger