数据巫师欲重塑ESPN叙事方式

    内特•希尔加盟ESPN有可能改变这一点。

    ESPN无疑是体育界的巨人，它不仅是北美最大的体育电视网络，同时也是北美最大的新闻和信息公司之一。在新闻和数据收集方面，ESPN的规模是非常大的。这种收集和分析大数据的能力，正是ESPN的下一个竞争优势。

    内特•希尔可能会在ESPN担任一个总军师的角色，他的到来对体育节目来说可能是革命性的。希尔在《纽约时代》（New York Times）工作的时候就是一个预言家，一个品牌，甚至是一个魔术师，他的博客FiveThirtyEight.com对选举结果的预测准确到令人发指的地步。这就是笼罩在希尔头上的光环。但是更重要的是，希尔可以利用数据讲故事，从而让我们大受裨益。这就是让人兴奋的地方。

    史蒂芬•D•莱维特的《魔鬼经济学》（Freakonomics）一书通过微观和宏观层面揭示了经济刺激是如何影响人类行为，从而改变了经济学门外汉对社会问题的看法。跟它一样，内特•希尔的博客通过对大数据的剖析揭示了人群的集体行为，而且在政治问题上给出了准确的结果。他能利用数字这根线将数据编成一个连贯的故事，再加上ESPN的资源，使他有了一个改变电视体育节目演播方式的机会。

    随着我们从一个质的世界进入一个量的世界，随着棒球经济学从棒球进入所有主要体育项目，电影《点球成金》（Moneyball）里的那套数据分析法也真的起到了“点球成金”之效。目前体育记者和体育迷们有了两个新的关注领域：

    ——首先，在表现模式方面，现有数据能告诉我们什么。也就是说，球队的老板、经理、教练、运动员和经纪人们是在何时、何地，如何做出关于人员、合同以及赛前和比赛策略的决策，以及他们是怎样做出一系列其它管理和训练决策的。

    ——其次，数据怎样才能直观地展示出来，告诉我们对于我们喜欢或讨厌的球员和球队来说，决策和球队表现之间的因果关系到底是怎样的。

    内特•希尔并不是体育新闻界的比利•比恩（电影《点球成金》里的男主角），事实上发明棒球经济学的人是比尔•詹姆斯。但是，如果ESPN在节目、愿景和创意上支持希尔的话，他还是大有可为的。为了使花在希尔身上的投资实现最大价值，ESPN不能把希尔当成又一个坐在演播里解释数据的传声筒，而是应该开始考虑设计新的节目价值、元素和活力，以支持希尔擅于讲故事的风格。

    Nate Silver's arrival at ESPN (DIS) just might change that.

    ESPN, which doth bestride the sports world like a colossus, isn't just the biggest sports network in North America, it's also one of the continent's largest news and information companies. When it comes to news and data-gathering ESPN has scale—massive scale—and that ability to capture and parse big data is ESPN's next competitive advantage.

    At ESPN Nate Silver is potentially an intellectual leader whose presence could be transformative to sports television. At the New York Times, Silver was a prognosticator and a brand, a conjuror who with his FiveThirtyEight.com blog was scarily accurate in predicting the outcomes of elections. That was the sizzle. But the actual steak is that Silver is able to tell stories we can all dine out on using data. That's what's so exciting.

    Just as Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics changed the way the lay person—or, at least, the people who write for the layperson—frames social issues by revealing how economic incentives affect human behavior on both micro and macro levels, Nate Silver through FiveThirtyEight.com parsed datasets and analyzed deltas to reveal human behavior in the aggregate and deliver fascinating takes on outcomes in the political world. Silver's ability to use numbers as a thread and weave data throughout a coherent narrative, when coupled with ESPN's resources, gives him the opportunity to transform how sports stories are told on the TV.

    。

    As we move from a qualitative to a quantitative world, as sabermetrics has migrated into all the major sports—and Moneyball has become Moneyballs—there are two new major areas of focus for sports journalists and sports fans:

    --What the available numbers tell us about patterns of performance: How, When, Where and Why do sports executives, managers, coaches, players and agents make their decisions about personnel, contracts, pre-game and in-game strategy, and a host of other coaching and management decisions; and

    --How can the data be visually represented and animated to actually illustrate patterns of cause and effect with regard to the

    decisions and performances of the players and teams that we love and hate, to bring a new dimension to sports coverage.

    Nate Silver isn't the Billy Beane of sports journalism—that honor goes to Bill James, the man who gave birth to sabermetrics—but Silver could be something special if ESPN supports him with production, vision and creativity. To get the most out of their substantial investment in Silver, ESPN needs avoid thinking of him as just some new talking head who requires infographics instead of highlights. Instead, ESPN needs to start thinking up new production values, elements and animations to support Silver's style of storytelling.