Daniel Okrent

Daniel Okrent (born April 2, 1948) is an American writer and editor.
He is best known for having served as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper, for inventing Rotisserie League Baseball, and for writing several books, most recently Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which served as a major source for the 2011 Ken Burns/Lynn Novick miniseries Prohibition. In November 2011, Last Call won the Albert J. Beveridge prize, awarded by the American Historical Association to the year's best book of American history.
Okrent and Peter Gethers, having acquired the theatrical rights to the site and name of the web series Old Jews Telling Jokes, co-wrote and co-produced a revue of that name. It opened at the Westside Theatre in Manhattan on May 20, 2012.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Okrent graduated from Cass Technical High School in Detroit in 1965 and from the University of Michigan, where he worked on the university's student newspaper The Michigan Daily.

Most of his career has been spent as an editor, at such places as Alfred A. Knopf; Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; Esquire Magazine; New England Monthly; Life Magazine; and Time, Inc.

His book Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (Viking, 2003) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.

In October 2003, Okrent was named public editor for The New York Times following the Jayson Blair scandal. He held this position until May 2005.

On May 3, 2014, the University of Michigan awarded Okrent an honorary degree: Doctor of Humane Letters.

He formulated what has become known as "Okrent's law" in an interview comment he made about his new job. It states: "The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true," referring to the phenomenon of the press providing legitimacy to fringe or minority viewpoints in an effort to appear even-handed.

Okrent invented Rotisserie League Baseball, the best-known form of fantasy baseball, in 1979. The name comes from the fact that he proposed the idea to his friends while dining at La Rôtisserie Française restaurant in New York City. Okrent's team in the Rotisserie League was called the "Okrent Fenokees", a pun on the Okefenokee Swamp. He was one of the first two people inducted into the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame. Okrent was still playing Rotisserie as of 2009 under the team name Dan Druffs. Ironically, despite having been credited with inventing fantasy baseball he has never been able to win a Rotisserie League he has ever entered. His exploits of inventing Rotisserie League Baseball were chronicled in Silly Little Game, part of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary series, in 2010.

Okrent is also credited with inventing the baseball stat, WHIP. At the time he referred to it as IPRAT, signifying "Innings Pitched Ratio."

In May 1981, Okrent wrote and Sports Illustrated published He Does It by the Numbers. This profile of the then-unknown Bill James launched James's career as baseball's foremost analyst.

In 1994, Okrent was filmed for his in-depth knowledge of baseball history for the Ken Burns documentary Baseball. During the nine-part series, a red-sweater-wearing Okrent delivered a detailed analysis of the cultural aspects of the national pastime, including a comparison of the dramatic Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds to the conflict and character development in Russian novels.

Okrent has engaged with the concept of the “Death of Print”. He believes that the advancement of digital technologies will make it easier for people to read print media online such as newspapers, magazines and books. In late 1999, Okrent spoke about the future of print media in the Hearst New Media Lecture at the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University. He told his audience “I believe they, and all forms of print, are dead. Finished. Over. Perhaps not in my professional lifetime, but certainly in that of the youngest people in this room. Remove the question mark from the title of this talk. The Death of Print, full stop”.

Okrent participates in LearnedLeague under the name "OkrentD".

• Baseball (1994), (2010) | Documentary | Directed by: Ken Burns
• Sweet And Lowdown (1999) | Role of: A.J. Pickman | Comedy-Drama | Directed by: Woody Allen
• Wordplay (2006) | Documentary | Directed by: Patrick Creadon
• The Hoax (2007) | Role of: Real Publisher #1 | Comedy-Drama | Directed by: Lasse Hallström
• Silly Little Game (2010) | Documentary | Directed by: Lucas Jansen and Adam Kurland
• Prohibition (2011) | Documentary | Directed by: Ken Burns