Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

♦  Peter Chernin, Rupert Murdoch's right-hand at News Corp., may be planning to depart the company in the near future. [LAT]
♦  60 Minutes has snagged the first interview with Barack Obama. [THR]
♦  WWD has a roundup of how magazines will fare overall in 2008. Most of the news is depressing, yes, but there are a couple of bright spots: Elle and Men's Journal reported 3 percent increases in ad pages. [WWD]
♦  You knew this one was coming: Political statistics star Nate Silver is reportedly shopping a pair of books to publishers. [NYO]More

Who will go down as one of the biggest winners of Election '08? (Not including Barack Obama, of course.) That would be Nate Silver, the obscure baseball statistician who is now the nerderrific numbers-man behind the polling data website FiveThirtyEight.com. If you can't watch a cable news show or read a newspaper or magazine without hearing or reading Silver's name, it's not your imagination. Silver was mentioned in the news 120 times during 2007. In the last seven days alone? His name has appeared in 267 major magazines, newspapers and websites. Now he just has to hope his methodology pans out—he's predicting 344 electoral votes for Obama and 193 for McCain—and he can look forward to many more hedge fund consulting gigs and a steady stream of cushy offers from cable networks.