Academic journalism: the concept at the heart of a conference – and The Conversation

By Stephen Khan, The Conversation

The Conversation was fortunate enough to be invited to co-host a conference in Dublin last week which focused on the relationship between academia and journalism. This is, of course, something that we know a little about at The Conversation, having spent more than a decade bringing academics together with professional journalists to create content that’s of value and interest to a broad public readership.

Indeed, the opening session of the conference, held at the splendid Royal Irish Academy and organised by University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute, was titled Academic Journalism, and I was asked to say a few words to kick things off. That headline had come about without any prompting from The Conversation, but the very term “academic journalism” has long sat at the heart of our internal considerations of the work we do. An annual award we present in the UK for excellence in the field even carries the words.

But what is academic journalism? I sought to stress to the audience that, to me anyway, it is, and has to be, more than simply asking authors with a long list of impressive qualifications to communicate in a style one might more associate with newspapers or broadcasters. Style is part of the equation, but so is substance. And fortunately, as we discussed in Dublin, the appetite for and opportunities to create such content has grown significantly over the last decade.

Significant shift

Around 100,000 academics have written for The Conversation. Its articles regularly record more than 40 million views a month on this and other sites, through our open republication model. The sole purpose of this project is the production of high-value content born of the collaborative efforts of academics and our journalists. Other organisations too though, increasingly see the value of this style of content. Examples include RTE’s Brainstorm in Ireland and Videnskab in Denmark.

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