The Conversation UK

About The Conversation UK

The Conversation UK is the British edition of a global news-and-analysis network that publishes articles written by academic experts and edited by professional journalists. Launched in the United Kingdom on 16 May 2013, it gives university researchers a platform to explain current affairs, scientific discoveries and cultural debates to a general audience in accessible language. Part of a not-for-profit network with editions in Australia, the United States, Canada, France and Africa, the UK edition is funded overwhelmingly by membership fees from British and European universities, with professional editors commissioning and editing work from thousands of scholars.

Origins in Australia

The Conversation began in Australia in 2011 as the brainchild of Andrew Jaspan, a former editor of The Observer and The Sunday Herald, who had lost his job as editor of The Age in Melbourne. Observing the hollowing-out of specialist reporting in newsrooms, Jaspan conceived a site staffed by professional journalists as editors but drawing on the expertise of academics and researchers to write its specialist content. The Australian site secured around £6 million in funding, mainly from the university sector, for its first three years, and quickly became, as Jaspan put it, the most popular independent news website in the country, attracting more than 850,000 unique visitors a month. In March 2017, Jaspan resigned as executive director and editor after being placed on enforced leave following complaints from senior staff about his management style and the group's global direction.

Launch of the UK Edition

Andrew Jaspan secured seed funding in 2012 to develop the case for launching The Conversation into the UK. It launched on 16 May 2013 with Stephen Khan — a former news editor at The Guardian who had also worked for The Independent and The Observer — as editor, Jonathan Hyams as chief executive, Max Landry as chief operating officer and Jaspan as editor-in-chief based in Australia. The site attracted £500,000 of funding to cover its first eight months, with premises provided by City, University of London. Thirteen founding partner universities committed financially to the pilot phase, including the University of Aberdeen, the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol, City University London, Glasgow Caledonian University, the University of Liverpool, the Open University, the University of Salford, the University of Sheffield, the University of Surrey, University College London (UCL) and the University of Warwick. Cardiff University also backed the launch, alongside the Wellcome Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Scottish Funding Council.

The Editorial Model

The Conversation's model is distinctive in journalism: its writers are academics who are either commissioned by the site's editors or pitch articles about their area of expertise in relation to current affairs. There are no staff writers. Instead, a team of professional editors — many with experience at traditional news outlets — work with contributors to turn scholarly knowledge into articles readable by the public, instructing newcomers in journalistic writing and shepherding pieces through a two-way editing process. Nothing is published unless both the editor and the author are satisfied: the author approves the final draft, including the title, pictures, captions and every detail, and retains control over what is said. Authors are not paid; they write as a community service and in return gain access to a vast audience and detailed readership metrics that help demonstrate the public impact of their research. Authors must disclose conflicts of interest, including funding sources and political affiliations, in published disclosure statements.

Creative Commons and Republication

A defining feature of The Conversation is that all articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution/No Derivatives licence, allowing free republication by other news organisations on condition that they credit the author and run the article as written. This open-access policy has made the site a major wire service of expertise: articles originating with the UK edition have been republished by household names including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Newsweek, El Pais and Yahoo. By August 2014 the UK edition had published articles by approximately 3,000 academics; by 2019 it had published 24,000 articles written by 14,000 academics. In April 2018, the UK website received around 3 million unique browsers, a figure which rose to 15 million when content republished across external news websites was included. Across all of its editions and republication sites, The Conversation generated 37 million total page views that month.

Funding and Governance

The Conversation UK is a not-for-profit company based in London. It is around 90 per cent funded by partnered universities paying annual membership fees, with the remainder coming from grants from organisations such as the Higher Education Funding Council. Membership grew from the original 13 institutions to more than 80 universities in the UK and Europe by 2019, including Cambridge, Oxford and Trinity College Dublin. Universities receive reader analytics and training from the site's editors in exchange for their fees. In April 2018, former BBC and Associated Press executive Chris Waiting was appointed chief executive of the UK edition. The editorial charter protects the organisation's editorial independence from its university funders, and the site does not publish paid or unpaid public relations material.

Coverage Areas

The Conversation mirrors universities in the topics and disciplines it covers. Its UK editors commission work across politics and society, science and technology, health, education, the environment, business and the arts. Coverage ranges from expert analysis of breaking news — elections, budgets, court rulings, scientific breakthroughs — to explainers on the research behind the headlines and commentary drawing on scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. A dedicated fact-check unit, in which academics' claims are blind peer-reviewed by another scholar, became accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, the Poynter Institute-hosted alliance of fact-checkers, in 2016. The site also became a member of the Independent Monitor for the Press (IMPRESS), an independent press regulator, in 2019.

The Five-Year Mark and Beyond

Speaking to the Press Gazette on the site's fifth anniversary in 2018, editor Stephen Khan said The Conversation had launched "a pre-emptive strike against fake news" before the term had even been coined. He described the UK press in 2013 as still adjusting to the aftermath of the Leveson Inquiry that followed the phone-hacking scandal, while facing plummeting print circulation and an advertising collapse — an "eye of the storm" for journalism's business model. The site positioned itself as an answer to the question of where expertise comes from as newspapers laid off specialist writers. Khan argued that the venture was motivated by a concern about trust and "how knowledge travels and how expertise is communicated to the public" — concerns that only intensified through the Brexit referendum and the debates about truth and expertise that followed.

Relationship with Universities

Universities are both funders and beneficiaries of the UK edition. For institutions, The Conversation offers a route to public engagement and a way of demonstrating research impact to funders: authors receive personal dashboards showing readership numbers, geographic reach and sharing activity on social media. UCL, a founding partner, reported by March 2014 that its academics had contributed over 40 articles and that the university ranked fourth among contributors and sixth among the top ten universities by readership, with over 200,000 readers. Universities also run on-campus sessions with the site's editors to train researchers in writing for a general audience. Editorial board members from institutions including City University, the University of Bristol and Goldsmiths, University of London, have helped govern the edition.

Place in the Media Landscape

The Conversation UK occupies a unique position between the academy and the press. It is neither a conventional newspaper nor a university publication, but a journalistic operation whose bylines belong to scholars. Its open-access republication model means its content travels far beyond its own site, shaping reporting across the mainstream media. For researchers, writing for The Conversation has become a recognised pathway into public commentary and into appearances in national outlets; for readers, it offers independent, authenticated explanatory journalism underpinned by academic rigour, free of advertising and paywalls. As one contributor put it, the site offers a space where the public can encounter expertise directly — and where universities can fulfil their public mission of sharing knowledge widely.