By Jonathan Este

The Conversation UK team at the Sir Paul Curran recently

The Conversation UK is an independent source of news analysis and informed comment written by academic experts working with professional journalists. Launched over a decade ago, with City St George’s, University of London, among its founding partners, The Conversation UK is a part of The Conversation International network, made up of 10 editions which operate across 14 countries.

In this article, Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor and Associate Editor of The Conversation UK reflects on the publication’s early days and journey in a changing journalism landscape. 

They said it wouldn’t work. When the founder of The Conversation, Andrew Jaspan, announced in 2011 he was launching a news website in Australia which would combine “academic rigour with journalistic flair”, Australian journalists were openly mocking of the prospect of anyone from the ivory towers of academe being able to produce anything that could rival their work. (Full disclosure: I was one of them.)

But two years later, as I struggled to make a living as a freelancer in the competitive UK market, I was contacted by Jaspan – with whom, despite my misgivings about his model – I had developed a friendly and mutually respectful relationship. He offered me a job and I jumped at the chance. In my mind Jaspan had gone from deluded Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of mainstream media, to nothing short of a visionary mastermind.

That The Conversation was already doing flourishing business in the Murdoch-dominated Australian media landscape suggested there might indeed be something in his plan to harness the deep specialist knowledge of academic experts with journalistic news sense and practical know-how.

And so it was that in April 2013 I took the train from my home in Cambridge to City University in London, where Jaspan had negotiated us premises in an apartment on the roof of one of the main buildings. There were seven of us, all told, including five section editors: politics (me), science,  health, environment and business, as well as an editor (Stephen Khan, who I’d become friendly with while working together on the foreign desk at The Independent and knew to be a superb editor) and Megan Clement, who was on secondment from the Australia version and in the event stayed on for several years, proving to be both a fantastic on the job trainer and highly talented all-round journalist.

We spent the next month learning the content management system and cold-calling academics to see if we could persuade them to write for us for nothing but the pleasure of being published on an as-yet untried news website which they all insisted on referring to as a “blog”, much to our irritation.

It was all done on the sniff of an oily rag and by the seat of our pants, and yet we were able to launch on May 24. Readership was pretty sluggish to start with. Looking back at the numbers we took several weeks to hit a million reads, and numbers of people accessing our individual stories tended to be in the hundreds rather than tens of thousands we were hoping for. But gradually momentum built, as did awareness in the academy and among readers of who we were and what we were trying to do.

Now, 12 years on, the team has grown from seven to more than 30 editors. Our offer has expanded from mid-length news features and now includes long reads of 3,000 to 4,000 words which take a deep dive into an important story, as well as weekly podcasts. Our work is regularly republished by prestigious outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Along the way we have notched up over 1.4 billion reads for the UK edition alone (we now publish in ten countries and several languages). We’ve had a little help over the years. Brexit proved a boon, as readers wanted a dispassionate explanation of exactly what the reasoning was on both sides of the argument. COVID was also a massive breakthrough for us. Our monthly reader numbers went from about 7 million to 15 million between March 2020 and April 2020.  

The sciences have proved particularly fruitful as readers seek expertise they can understand. One piece about how people with depression use language differently, has notched up 19.5 million readers to date.

Other stories that stand out include one of the first long reads published by our Insights team back in 2019, which broke the story of the children fathered by UN peacekeepers on Haitian women and girls between 2004 and 2017. The story was followed up everywhere: The UK Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post. It was a real demonstration of The Conversation’s reach.

From a personal perspective, I’m proud of the way we have covered international affairs since I took charge of the desk in January 2021. We’ve been busy over the four years, what with the January 6 insurrection, the invasion of Ukraine, war in Gaza and the re-election of Donald Trump. In fact, my working life has become a perfect storm of constant global turmoil, made ever more roller-coaster-ish by Trump’s first 100 days.

Each week now I write a newsletter which provides a commentary and highlights some of the excellent stories produced by our specialist authors. 

As an international editor it’s tough enough to cover moving stories such as these with a team of seasoned professional journalists to write for you. Persuading academic authors to find time in their own busy schedules to turn a story around, often within a few hours, can be a big challenge.

But we get to spend our working lives talking to some of the best-informed experts about the biggest stories of our lives, picking their brains and harnessing their considerable knowledge to produce work of which we are all very proud.

Towards the end of my time in and around what has become known as the “legacy media”, I watched journalism being hollowed out as news organisations strived to cut costs. Often it was the specialists: the science, health and environment editors who were the first to go. Which is why involving academics, with their vast reservoirs of specialist knowledge, is a no-brainer. 

At the same time, academics benefit from the exposure they get to bigger audiences than they could ever hope to reach when they publish in specialist journals. We keep tabs on what happens to our authors after their stories are published. Most are contacted by other media, many make connections and collaborations with other researchers and some get worthwhile and sometimes lucrative work as a result of publishing with us. It’s a win-win.  

In May 2016, as the UK prepared to vote for Brexit, Michael Gove uttered the immortal words: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.” These days when I give talks to groups of academics, I write these words on the whiteboard, and we have a jolly good laugh. How wrong he has proved to be. A little like me in 2011.

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