Nate Silver, the numbers guy and author of FiveThirtyEight, absolutely crushed it last night. Silver had come under fire for his presidential predictions — most notably from Joe Scarborough and Dylan Byers, of Politico — but as the results rolled in, it became clear that he correctly called the way each state would turn. Scarborough has yet to say anything about Silver’s good night, but Byers did tweet “Nate Silver nailed it.”

The video above features Silver speaking with The New York Times’ blog editor Megan Liberman about the results. To his credit, Silver didn’t take the opportunity to gloat. He did, however, post a perfect tweet after Obama was declared the winner:

Today is the last day of Politico’s On Media blog, per a post on the site. Bill Nichols, Managing Editor of the site, explains in a memo that media coverage will be added to the blog maintained by Ben Smith, with Emily Schultheis and recent hire Dylan Byers contributing.

More on the change:

Our media blog in its current form will end, which has the happy result of giving Keach Hagey free reign to concentrate totally on the long-form journalism she does so well. While Ben and Dylan will concentrate on viewing the media through the prism of the 2012 campaign, Keach will be able to roam throughout the media landscape. Two of her most recent stories — a terrific tick-tock on the Post’s Marco Rubio piece and a sharp look at liberal journalists getting caught up in the Occupy Wall Street movement — are testament to her keen eye and writing skills.

The New York Observer had a bit of good news today, but  Dylan Byers, writing for Adweek, is raining on that parade.  He says that Christopher Barnes – aided by the unwavering confidence Jared Kushner has in him – is killing the newspaper.

Byers gets scathing quotes from several former Observer staffers, going from bad – “He’s a used car salesman” – to worse – “He would also mock employees who had been hired for painfully low salaries.”

Barnes’ main mistake, aside from apparently coming off like an overall jerk to employees, is that he has abandoned the paper’s longstanding journalistic niche, in favor of focusing on sales. Of course this approach has brought on a slew of editorial changes:

Read more