RSSeNEWS to be determined...

The New York Times online is to license FiveThirtyEight, the influential blog founded by statistician and analyst Nate Silver. Posts are expected to appear in the NY Times politics section starting in August.

FiveThirtyEight's analysis of politics, sports, and social trends is based upon statistical modeling and has developed a loyal audience. The New York Times, America's 'paper of record', will carry this content as news, fully integrated into the NY Times website. Silver will work with the NY Times editorial team, who will apply the publication's own editorial standards and tone of voice to the content.

Times’s digital news editor Jim Roberts says both parties will gain from the three-year arangement: “There’s a real startup quality to FiveThirtyEight. And we’ve got a giant infrastructure here of graphics editors, multimedia producers, interactive technologists … who are really eager to work with him. They’ll make his blog better — and I hope we can incorporate some of his insights in different ways in other parts of the website.”

One of the first issues sure to get coverage is the 2010 US elections. Silver is working on a new model to forecast the balance of power in the House of Representatives, and updating his model used previously to forecast Senate seats.

Though FiveThirtyEight's strapline is 'politics done right', its most read report concerns KFC’s Double Down sandwich. Second most read is a recent report on growing public support for marijuana legalisation.

Silver told the Nieman Journalism Lab (a collaborative organisation that is developing strategies to help quality journalism survive and thrive in the internet age) that "you might see a different version of the website in 2011 than you do in 2010 … I think we’ll continue to surprise people and evolve around a number of different dimensions.”

According to Nielsen NetRatings, nytimes.com was America's most read newspaper website in December 2008.

Silver first gained attention for his system that forecasts the performance and career development of players in Major League Baseball. His public profile increased dramatically when he correctly predicted the winner in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 US presidential election. In April 2009 Time Magazine included him in its Time 100 list of the world's most influential people.