Nate Silver leaves New York Times for ESPN/ABC; will now officially predict Oscars

Nate Silver, the former baseball statistician whose FiveThirtyEight blog began a run of stunningly accurate Presidential and Senate election predictions in 2007 before being absorbed by the New York Times in 2010, is returning to his roots. Silver's contract with the Times expires this year, and rather than renew, he's taken a job with both ESPN and parent network ABC's news division. Silver's blog will once again be a standalone site on the model of Grantland, the platform ESPN gave to sportswriter Bill Simmons, which has a stable of regular writers and covers sports and pop culture.

Silver will also appear on-air as an ESPN analyst, and in election years will be part of ABC News' on-air team. In addition, ABC wants the famed prognosticator to turn his crystal ball towards the Oscars, making his predictions a significant part of the network's coverage of the awards. The only wrinkle is that while Silver's election predictions have been nearly flawless (missing only one state in the last two presidential elections combined), his Oscar track record is less so. Silver has attempted to pick Oscar winners three times, and thus far he's 13-for-18, picking only a handful of categories each time.