Times to Host Blog on Politics and Polls

The New York Times said Thursday that it would begin hosting the popular blog FiveThirtyEight and make its founder, Nate Silver, a regular contributor to the newspaper and its Sunday magazine.

In a three-year licensing arrangement, the FiveThirtyEight blog will be folded into NYTimes.com. Mr. Silver, regularly called a statistical wizard for his political projections based on dissections of polling data, will retain all rights to the blog and will continue to run it himself.

In recent years, The Times and other newspapers have tapped into the original, sometimes opinionated voices on the Web by hiring bloggers and in some cases licensing their content. In a similar arrangement, The Times folded the blog Freakonomics into the opinion section of the site in 2007.

The Times said that content from FiveThirtyEight would be incorporated on a daily basis on the politics section of its Web site. Additionally, Mr. Silver will write for the newspaper and The New York Times Magazine, and he will work with the journalists and developers who create interactive graphics for NYTimes.com.

“Nate won considerable recognition during the 2008 presidential campaign for his timely and prescient reports on the electoral races and on public opinion,” Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We look forward to his unique perspectives on statistics, covering a wide swath of issues relating to politics, culture and sports.”

In a telephone interview Thursday, Mr. Silver said he foresaw a more journalistic approach for the blog. “It will be interesting to work in a real newsroom environment,” he said, adding that the blog would “be a little bit newsier.”

He said he expected that the blog would be moved to the Times Web site in August.

Mr. Silver spent much of the last decade specializing in baseball statistics. In the early months of the 2008 presidential election, Mr. Silver was disenchanted with coverage of polls, so he started posting his interpretations on the Web site Daily Kos.

He introduced FiveThirtyEight.com in March 2008, initially under the same pseudonym he had used on Daily Kos, and gained attention for his projections of electoral vote counts and Congressional races using complex formulas. He started to use his own name two months later, and soon became a prominent figure.

Mr. Silver has been upfront about his political views, writing in 2008 that he was a supporter of President Obama and that he had voted for Democratic candidates “the majority of the time (though by no means always).”

On Thursday, he said the blog is a “pretty down-the-middle analysis of elections and other issues, including nonpolitical issues.” In April, for instance, he published a comprehensive nutritional analysis of fast-food sandwiches showing how they stacked up to a new KFC concoction called the Double Down.

Mr. Silver said FiveThirtyEight met with a number of suitors and entertained outright acquisition offers. He said he valued the international reach and exposure of The Times.