Nate Silver, political stat guru for The New York Times, is doing a “Ask Me Anything” for Reddit right now. Go ask him some questions. Smart ones.

To whet your appetitie, here’s Silver’s take on if he’d ever unveil the formula that he uses:

I’d certainly like to aim to increase the level of disclosure at 538 going forward. Sometimes what happens is that I have best intentions to write a super detailed, 5000-word methodology post, and then some senate candidate does or says something stupid, and I get caught up in the news cycle and it gets forgotten about. Which is a pretty lame excuse, I know. At the same time, 538 is a commercial business and the ability to license proprietary intellectual property is a fairly big part of how I make my living, so the disclosure would probably stop short of outright releasing source code or my database in most cases.

It’s awards season! Get excited. Unless you don’t ever win awards, then just listen to your favorite Jewel record and curl into a ball until you feel better. Anyway, here’s one award among many: Jonah Peretti, co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, has been named I Want Media’s 2012 Person of The Year.

Peretti was the clear favorite among I Want Media’s readers, grabbing 39 percent of the vote. He beat out Nate Silver, Tina Brown and Anderson Cooper. According to I Want Media, Peretti deserved to win:

Peretti and his BuzzFeed team attracted much press coverage in 2012, as they aspired to create a new model for Internet journalism. Peretti, a co-founder of the Huffington Post, described his site’s model as social publishing — one that mined the growing number of people sharing news and other content on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Best known for viral fluff like ’50 photos of cat heaven,’ BuzzFeed this year made moves into serious reporting and took an ambitious plunge into longform journalism.

At the Business Insider Ignite media summit in New York, New York Times editor Jill Abramson said that she “would love” to keep FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver in the company through at least the next election.

“He got huge, huge readership. Half the people coming [to NYTimes.com] searched for Nate, they weren’t coming for the rest of the Times, they came for him,” Abramson said. “You hope they will be tantalized by other things on the buffet table.”

Abramson says that the Times could help Silver expand beyond the data-based political reporting for which he has become a household name:

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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:

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor, has been great since taking on the role, but when she attacked Nate Silver, she was wrong. Silver, the author of the political blog FiveThirtyEight, has become a target for Republicans lately because his prediction model has President Barack Obama easily beating Mitt Romney next Tuesday.

Joe Scarborough recently called Silver and his work out, and so Silver asked Scarboroguh to bet on the election results. “If you think it’s a toss-up, let’s bet,” tweeted Silver, to Scarborough. “If Obama wins, you donate $1,000 to the American Red Cross. If Romney wins, I do. Deal?”

Sullivan caught wind of the bet and called out Silver:

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It’s Nate Silver‘s turn to take on the value of the New York Times paywall today, which he does for his Times‘ blog FiveThirtyEight in a refreshingly quantitative (albeit somewhat self-satisfied) fashion.

“For our readers who have been focused on real news — instead of news about the news industry,” Silver begins. Ahem! We at FishbowlNY think news about the news industry qualifies as real news, fyi. But enough about us.

Silver goes on to analyze the economic value of the Times by dissecting whether or not adequate substitutes exist for the Times in terms of original reporting.

Using Google search, Silver tallied how often various news organizations were cited as having “reported” news, in order to obtain a representative sample of which organizations were doing the bulk of original reporting (instead of just writing about someone else’s reporting). He then compared the results from 260 different news outlets, including  all blogs ranked in the Technorati top 100, all newspapers ranked in the top 100 in daily United States circulation, and other relevant outlets.

The fascinating results: “Collectively, just eight of the 260 organizations accounted for more than half the citations for reporting.”

The point he makes by this exercise is simple: there is a lot of competition for where to read the news, but little competition for actually reporting the news. And “the sort of reporting that organizations like CNN, The New York Times, The Associated Press, the BBC and Al Jazeera do… doesn’t come cheaply.”

Business Insider’s Joe Pompeo is reporting that New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson dispelled any rumors of the Times putting a stop on their standard print operations and switching over to strictly digital distribution.  Robinson told analysts on a conference call this morning that the Times “will be printing newspapers for many years to come.”  

Robinson’s made her assurance in the wake of NYT‘s announcement of third quarter financial declines.  Circulation revenues are down nearly 5 percent while print ad revenues dropped by close to 6 percent.  Overall, the company reported a net loss of $4.3 million from July through September.

Robinson had an easier time shedding some positive light on the company’s online efforts as digital ad revenues increased 14.6 percent last quarter.  She discussed Press Engine, the Times‘s promising new app development program set to launch in the fourth quarter.  Press Engine is reportedly fetching a licensing fee upwards of $50,o00 from publishers.  Other digital initiatives that Robinson touched on were the growth of Times‘s business news blog, DealBook, last week’s release of the “full blown Times” iPad app, and the recent partnership with Nate Silver‘s FiveThirtyEight political stats and polling page. 

As for any specifics on the NYTimes.com paywall scheduled for January, Robinson had no updates:

“We plan to release details on price and gate placement closer to the launch,” she said.  “This first click free model will preserve NYTimes.com’s significant reach and ad inventory.”

Today and tomorrow, FishbowlNY will be reporting from the Personal Democracy Forum, a conference that focuses on the intersection of politics and technology.

This morning, after a keynote from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (in which he revealed that his home phone number was listed in the phone book for many years until a reporter discovered it and published it) we sat through presentations by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, Ning.com founder Gina Bianchini, Harvard researchers Danah Boyd and David Weinberger and media critic Jeff Jarvis.

(Photo: Jeff Jarvis presents at the Personal Democracy Forum on Monday morning)

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More lists! Maybe itemizing things makes the terrible year media we just suffered easier to bear. Also it’s a fun way to fill the time between now and opening the champagne. Anyway, here’s the final installment:

• Rex Sorgatz has put together a very smart list of this year’s most notable blogs. Parts of which made us wonder if we spend enough time on the Internet! The list includes the notable likes of, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nate Silver, NYT.com, Kanye West, Ana Marie Cox, and something called Single Serving Blogs — Rex explains it all here!

• Twitter! And lots of it, in the form of the top twenty Twitter posts of 2008.
• Over at TVNewser you can take your pick of any number of lists and polls. In fact you might call it a list and poll bonanza! We’re not kidding, go see for yourself.
• Meanwhile over at Galley Cat, you can find a round-up of 2008 stories divided into months. Seriously industrious.
• Andrew Sullivan is posting the winners of the 2008 Daily Dish Awards.
• Of course if none of this will suffice, there is always George Bush’s reading list.
• And speaking of reading lists, here’s a sort of list of memoirs that didn’t make it past the ever vigilant guardians of the publishing world.
  

There’s been plenty of talk the last few weeks about a post-election viewer slump both online and on television. Over at 538.com Nate Silver has taken his pollster powers and applied them to politically-oriented websites to see how these sites are faring now that the election has concluded. The results are interesting.

Turns out that TheAtlantic.com, which recently redesigned both its magazine and website, has experienced an upswing in traffic (retaining 125% of its pre-election traffic), so has Drudge and to a lesser extent The Huffington Post. Meanwhile the NYT.com is more or less breaking even while sites such as Slate and Politico have dropped and are only retaining 50-60% of their traffic. Silver explains how he reached these numbers, and what the caveats to his results might be, here.