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"Nate Silver, by just about any stretch of the imagination, is one of the most impactful journalists of the Internet era.\nHis start as an editor-in-chief, however, is proving to be a rude awakening.\nSee also: Nate Silver Gives the Lowdown on New ESPN Site at SXSW\nCritics have lambasted his new website, FiveThirtyEight, since its launch on March 17 with a range of gripes including a lack of diversity, questions about its climate reporter and his initial post, and general disappointment about the content on the site.\nAnd of course it wouldn't be the Internet without a healthy dose of snark.\n\nWhy everyone hates Nate Silver, in one chart\n\u2014 Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) March 19, 2014\n\nSilver is no stranger to enduring disparagement of his work. He became a popular target of attack from conservatives who felt his model unfairly favored Democrats in the run up to the 2012 election. Silver's model ended up accurately forecasting the presidential leanings of all 50 states, destroying pundits and rival models alike. \nBut everybody has their breaking point.\nNone of the voices in the chorus of critics has been as loud as\u00A0Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who also serves as a columnist at Silver's old stomping grounds,\u00A0The New York Times.\nKrugman, who has his own blog titled \"The Conscience of a Liberal,\" has published multiple posts featuring either his own criticism or the critiques of others. He has pulled few punches himself, writing recently about FiveThirtyEight: \"So far it looks like something between a disappointment and a disaster.\"\nSilver is not without some blame in the matter. In an interview with New York Magazine just days before the launch of FiveThirtyEight, Silver lumped the Times op-ed columnists with those of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as \"hedgehogs\" that know \"one big thing.\"\n\"They don\u2019t permit a\u00A0lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence\u00A0and draw grand conclusions based on them,\" Silver told the magazine.\nSilver and Krugman then exchanged barbs in a Talking Points Memo article,\nIt\u00A0appeared on Wednesday that Silver felt he and FiveThirtyEight had endured enough criticism after Krugman published a post entitled \"Data as Slogan, Data as Substance,\" which detailed the mostly negative commentary of economics blogger Noath Smith.\nSilver fired back at Krugman with another bit of data journalism that showed the\u00A0Times\u00A0economics expert taking a decidedly more negative tone about Silver since he left the paper.\n\"While it can be easy to extrapolate a spurious trend from a limited number of data points, the differences are highly statistically significant,\" Silver wrote in the post.\nWhat had been a mostly content-based discussion had turned personal, drawing even more negative attention to Silver and his still brand-new site. Among a variety of posts about the feud,\u00A0Slate's David Weigel pointed out\u00A0that Silver seemed to have a liberal idea of what constitutes a \"positive\" post.\nOthers jumped in with praise for Silver's snarky response.\n\nI love this. http://t.co/aKXC3lbLX3 via @fivethirtyeight\n\u2014 Michael Arrington (@arrington) March 27, 2014\n\n\nIf you question @FiveThirtyEight, @FiveThirtyEight will go @FiveThirtyEight on you. http://t.co/PVaOTWctHY\n\u2014 Joel Stein (@thejoelstein) March 27, 2014\n\n\u00A0\n\nFor Columnist, a Change of Tone http://t.co/zIzCPR3Bvg (this is now the textbook definition of a sick burn)\n\u2014 Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) March 27, 2014\n\nJournalists tend to be hard on their own, and Silver is no exception.\u00A0The media eagerly anticipated FiveThirtyEight. Silver helped to redefine data and political analysis while at the Times. If that's what he could do with a blog, imagine what he could do with an entire website bankrolled by ESPN and ABC.\n\"I think all the criticisms of the new 538 site are based on the idea that Nate Silver is exceptional and can do better than the middle of the pack,\" wrote Noah Smith in an update to the blog post that Krugman quoted. \"It's the curse of high expectations.\"\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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