Nate is a hybrid. The details of his model are not on Github or anything, but he does describe his general approach, and he works from publicly available information.
For the same reasons, Chris Christie and Michael Blomberg feel safe throwing Romney under the bus.
Good point that they act extremely numerate (is that a word?) in how they respond to polling numbers.
Got any data to back this up?
It was much better when journalism was a trade that you went into. Street savviness was the journo's hallmark. They had no loyalty to power, because they came from the wrong side of the tracks, and their livelihood depended on exposing secrets. Great journalists were ugly, ink-stained, alcoholic wretches.
Those people are gone. Now there's two kinds of professional journalists. Middle class people who were educated to do journalism at university, fighting over the few scraps of remunerative work left. And people who want to shill for one of the dominant political coalitions. These groups get to the gym a lot more often, but are constrained by their loyalty to the system.
So, journalism would be better if it was less respectable. We also need to put a stop to all the social mobility that's happening. When you block an entire group of people from attending university or holding office on some irrational basis like ethnic origin, you usually get some really good journalists. But there is cause for hope. Perhaps the end of privacy means we'll get more people in the media like Eliot Spitzer.
but just the weather service is not enough
(what I would have said had I more time first time)