So Nate Silver won in 50 states; big data was the winner; and Nate Silver and data won the election. And somewhere along the lines some guy called Obama won something, too.

Elections set the pace for much of journalism’s development: predictable enough to allow for advance planning; big enough to justify the budgets to match, they are the stage on which news organisations do their growing up in public.

For most of the past decade, those elections have been about social media: the YouTube election; the Facebook election; the Twitter election. This time, it wasn’t about the campaigning (yet) so much as it was about the reporting. And how stupid some reporters ended up looking. Continue reading →