A conversation about The Conversation

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Andrew Jaspan

The Conversation is a unique publication that examines issues in the news by harnessing academic expertise. Since launching in March 2011 it has built a readership of around 450,000 readers a month. It’s based in Australia, but more than half its readers come from other countries. And many of the 3,500 academics registered with the site (about one tenth of all academics in Australia) have found new audiences for their ideas and analysis.

The business model? This not-for-profit receives most of its funding from partner universities and so doesn’t rely on advertising.

The site has been designed to facilitate public discourse and provide a means of extending and measuring the impact of academics in the public sphere. In so doing, it has also made its mark in developing best practices for online journalism for not only its readers, but also for its editors and writers, says co-founder, Executive Director and Editor Andrew Jaspan who previously edited The Age in Melbourne and several British newspapers.

The Conversation’s charter sets out how it aims to fulfil its mission:

  • Give experts a greater voice in shaping scientific, cultural and intellectual agendas by providing a trusted platform that values and promotes new thinking and evidence-based research.
  • Unlock the knowledge and expertise of researchers and academics to provide the public with clarity and insight into society’s biggest problems.
  • Create an open site for people around the world to share best practices and collaborate on developing smart, sustainable solutions.
  • Provide a fact-based and editorially-independent forum, free of commercial or political bias.
  • Ensure the site’s integrity by only obtaining non-partisan sponsorship from education, government and private partners. Any advertising will be relevant and non-obtrusive.
  • Ensure quality, diverse and intelligible content reaches the widest possible audience by employing experienced editors to curate the site.
  • Support and foster academic freedom to conduct research, teach, write and publish.
  • Work with our academic, business and government partners and our advisory board to ensure we are operating for the public good.

To realise this, Jaspan explains to me in the publication’s Melbourne office, The Conversation has developed ‘author dashboards’ (see below) for contributors that record the number of people who read each article, where they’re from, comments, likes on Facebook and tweets – ‘all of which is one way of demonstrating impact’. Everything the site publishes is licensed through Creative Commons, which means it’s free for anyone to republish providing that they don’t change the copy, and show where the piece came from. ‘This means the academic, the institution and The Conversation. So it allows you to write for us but have your content disseminated very widely anywhere in the world.’

One of The Conversation’s author dashboards (used with permission)

While many academics already have established media profiles, Jaspan points out that part of The Conversation’s strategy is to nurture experts who have yet to contribute to newspapers or websites. ‘We started with saying a lot of academics either don’t enjoy engagement with the media or they are shy or some of them just need the experience and help,’ says Jaspan.

‘So we introduced a new way of working where we have professional editors — we have two per section here, who work as commissioning editors.’ (One of these editors – also known as curators or producers — is former La Trobe student and upstart editor, Matt de Neef). These editors engage with academics who work in particular areas and may help shape the key argument and story angle for a proposed piece.

Jaspan says that the author dashboards provide a way to demonstrate the impact of individual academics and universities (which also have their own metrics) in public discourse. The aggregation of academic expertise has also led to new opportunities for academics to become involved in policy development. A recent series on Australia in the Asian Century culminated  in a roundtable hosted by Ken Henry, chair of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s taskforce on Asia. ’There was a debate there, and in terms of policy development, that’s a form of impact,’ says Jaspan.

Technological innovations also help the site to realise its mission.  All authors write on a specially developed collaborative writing platform which is designed to enhance transparency and trust. Contributors must register to demonstrate that they have credentials in a particular area. ‘We only allow people to write in the area that they know about, and we want the reader to know that that person really has deep expertise,’ Jaspan explains.

Contributors must also fill out a disclosure statement ‘because we need to know who is funding them. Even if it just the Australian Research Council, we need to know that, and also if they’re affiliated with any organisations that could raise a question of conflict of interest’. Jaspan adds that sometimes the perception of conflict of interest can be best dealt with just by being open about a relationship or connection, while, conversely, hiding the fact that you’re affiliated to something can diminish trust.

‘So that’s what we ask for, and on our side we deliver a writing platform that includes tips on how to write an article, and how to finish an article.’ Another feature of the site’s collaborative writing platform is its readability index that is set to the reading age of an educated 16 year-old ‘because this is a public facing website, it’s not academic to academic, it’s to bring in as many people as possible’. And authors have to sign off on final copy before their piece is published.

Another notable feature of the site is its community standards which were designed to enhance the quality of discussion for not only its readers, but also its writers and editors. These standards were developed after examining best practices in sites such as ProPublica, Nieman Jouranlism Lab, The Guardian, NPR, and Newser.

Could any of The Conversation’s  attempts to forge best practices have application in commercial media? Here Jaspan notes that The Conversation was being developed and launched at a time of serious concern about poor public ethics and practices within the commercial media as the News of the World scandal unravelled.

‘If you want to actually rebuild trust you need to demonstrate how you’re doing that. Make sure you know who people are, the provenance of that person, the funding of that person, what they actually know about it. Make sure that you can actually deal with complaints properly, make sure you have proper process in place to have people engage with the authors.’

For Jaspan, this is all part of the process of responsible journalism ‘which is in a sense what we’re trying to rebuild. I’m not saying that we’ve come up with the answer, but these are just our attempts to rebuild trust in the media. Unless you do that the media of the future will continue to be mistrusted.’

The success of the site in building a substantial audience so quickly suggests that not only is the experiment working, but might also be adaptable elsewhere, providing that universities in other countries warm to the idea of contributing to the development of a publishing platform that connects academics to a broader public.

Follow Andrew Jaspan on Twitter @AndrewJaspan; The Conversation’s Twitter handle is @conversationedu

Lawrie Zion (@lzion) is an Associate Professor of Journalism at La Trobe University, which is one of The Conversation’s member institutions. He is also registered with The Conversation.

Journalism at the speed of bytes – a timely report

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What do print journalists and editors really think about their rapidly contracting world? The recently published report ‘Journalism at the Speed of Bytes: Australian newspapers in the 21st century’ is a well-researched and illuminating analysis of print journalism in Australia. It’s informed by interviews with 100 editors and editorial staff from all 12 of Australia’s major daily newspapers.

Not surprisingly, it’s pretty sobering stuff, but all the more poignant in the light of the huge job cuts recently announced at Australia’s two main newspaper publishing companies, Fairfax Media and News Ltd. But the decline of the newspaper business model, the report points out, has implications beyond the industry and those who earn a living in it. ‘The crisis for newspapers represents a growing crisis for all citizens who directly or indirectly rely on professional news reporting to keep informed and, ultimately, to decide how to vote.’

The report, which was written and researched by journalism academics Penny O’Donnell and David McKnight, and The Walkley Foundation’s Jonathan Este, explores three main questions: What do we know about quality journalism? What does the transition of digital journalism mean for news quality? And what could journalists do – perhaps in league with readers – to renew and extend their standards in this transition period?

On the second question the report also identified a ‘newsroom-training deficit’ in Australia. ‘Many of the journalists we spoke to wanted to know about best-practice digital journalism, not just how to use the latest content management system or software package ….The lack of employer-provided professional development opportunities in this area, documented in this study, arguably amounts to a form of de-professionalisation of the workforce.’

But workplace training is just one issue. It’s the third of the report’s questions, about renewing standards, that’s especially interesting, because in many ways it’s the least discussed and perhaps the least understood of the problems facing Australian media in the digital age. One of its key findings is that that more work is needed ‘to define excellence in digital journalism, explain what it looks like and identify the criteria that can be used to evaluate what it does best’.  

While sensibly advocating that this can be addressed in part through evaluating the criteria the Walkleys and other awards, a complementary initiative, the report suggests, might be to open a public dialogue about digital journalism standards, with wide-ranging input, including from journalists and readers engaged with web only news sites – for example, Crikey, mUmBRELLA, Business Spectator, Global Mail, Inside Story, The Conversation, and New Matilda.

This suggestion echoes similar calls for a more open approach to developing best practices in digital journalism elsewhere. In a paper I recently presented to the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, I examined how a series of best practices initiatives carried out by the Canadian Association of Journalists – an organisation that has no direct parallel in Australia – and the American University’s Center for Social Media  that identify best practices issues in the ethics of unpublishing, accuracy and the correction of errors, fair use and copyright, and public broadcasting. I also identify two recent Australian initiatives – the Australian Press Council’s report on standards relating to suicide reporting, and the Reporting Diversity project – that share many of the common features of these best practices initiatives, even though their focus is not specifically on digital media. The (mostly) common features of the initiatives I discuss in my paper is that they identify emerging situations, share findings, foster collaboration, suggest rather than proscribe, and consult through engagement with communities to develop guidelines. In this way they’re all part of the process of opening up debates about journalism ethics.

While every jurisdiction is different, I’d argue that in our globalising mediascape, the CAJ and Center for Social Media reports could provide useful starting points for opening up the discussion about emerging digital best practices in Australia.

Ditto for the Press Council, which, it’s to be hoped, will emerge from the current review of media regulation in Australia well enough resourced to continue with its standards project. The ‘Journalism at the Speed of Bytes’ report demonstrates that there’s a need to engage in emerging best practices issues, whether we’re journalists, educators, bloggers, or even citizens who don’t happen to be journalists, but who are nonetheless stakeholders in how our media is being reconfigured.

Best practices and journalism education

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What role could journalism education play in shaping emerging best practices in digital journalism?

A crucial one, says Paul Bradshaw, who is a visiting professor at City University, London. Bradshaw has recently published a series of posts on his Online Journalism Blog that discuss how changes in the news industry were reflected in changing journalism education,  how education itself is reacting to changes in information, and the relationship between the industry and journalism education.

Earlier this week he published an addendum that listed some points about how education is adapting to the new information environment, changes in the news industry, and in the relationship with news organisations.

It’s his first point that I want to focus on here, where he suggests that journalism schools should be ‘Taking a lead in identifying best practice in new journalism skills – and transmitting that back to the news industry’.

This is a big call, given that as Bradshaw himself acknowledges, in the UK ‘the relationship between journalism schools and news organisations has largely been a supply chain of newsroom-ready graduates’.

Granted, there could be a more collaborative way of framing the advice that he offers than suggesting that any findings be ‘transmitted back to the news industry’. But I couldn’t agree more with the idea of journalism schools taking more of a leading role in exploring emerging best practices.

Of course Bradshaw is hardly alone in calling for journalism educators to reimagine their role in the unfolding mediascape. In a recent speech given to a journalism educators conference in the US entitled  ‘How Journalism Education Can, and Should, Blow Up the System’, the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton argues that ‘Curriculum reform needs to be more than dissolving print and broadcast silos. It should redefine journalism, an intellectual activity in its own right’.

Now personally I’m not that partial to blowing things up, but I do believe that there are times when some things need pulling apart. Six years ago, I was asked to teach a final year subject where the sole assessment listed in the university handbook was a single 5,000-word feature article. Not surprisingly, very little student work was actually being published.

Three years later we launched upstart so that La Trobe University students could develop publishing and digital media skills. As well as running stories every weekday, upstart is now hardwired into our curriculum, which means that as well as being assessed for their storytelling skills, students get marks for everything from tagging and tweeting to hyperlinking and moderating comments.

Students who enrol in our new final-year subject Online Editing and Publishing take on specific editorial roles in upstart. By doing this they develop, and bring to the group) a grasp of best practices issues that are further developed in their daily collaborations with their classmates and academic staff in the weekly “class”.

In this respect upstart is a best practices laboratory, and by extension so is our journalism program. While we don’t claim to get live best practice every day in every post — and no doubt something will blow up in the future — we do strive for it.

In the meantime, I’d welcome any comments and suggestions.

upstart home page

My 2010 article ‘(up)start from scratch’ published in the AEJMC’s ‘Scholastic Source’ (scroll down to page 3)

Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog

An inventory of best practices projects and reports

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I’ve just posted a list of reports and projects addressing issues of best practices in digital journalism. This list is a work in progress, and I’ll be regularly updating it.

The projects differ considerably in scale, ranging from blog posts to large-scale research initiatives. I’ve included them if they open up the discussion of how to address issues that arise with emerging practices in digital journalism. 

Some of the reports aren’t specifically badged “best practices”, but are serving that purpose in all but name. Conversely, I’m not automatically including every post or project that uses the term “best practices” in its title. For instance I would be unlikely to draw attention to a report entitled ‘Best Practices in Preventing Web Traffic from Bleeding to Rival Sites’ (I’ve checked and it doesn’t exist – yet).

Comments or suggestions? Please email me on l.zion@latrobe.edu or tweet me @lzion. Here’s the list so far.

Adopting best practices in mass internet participation

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When people say “best practices” in the media they’re not always talking about the same thing. My voluminous Google News Alert inbox is testament to that. But surprisingly often there’s a common theme in the way the term is invoked, even when it is used as a seemingly casual turn of phrase. It goes something like this: let’s acknowledge the chaos, discard the arcane old ways, and create some kind of new order out of it all. Here’s a fresh example:

‘In addition to collecting readers around our voices, we should make sure our readers can find theirs, too. And when they are saying something worthwhile, we should make sure our readers are heard, as well. To that end, we should move aggressively to adopt best practices in mass Internet participation.’

The quote comes from an article published earlier this week called ‘”Playing it Safe” Is Killing the American Newspaper’ by Dan Froomkin, who is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. As the title suggests, the piece is an erudite and impassioned plea for change in journalism. In her excellent health blog, Croakey, Melissa Sweet goes as far as to say that many of the general themes he raises ‘might be equally useful for other industries’.

Froomkin argues that ‘If we were to start an online newspaper from scratch today, we’d recognize that toneless, small-bore news stories are not the way to build a large audience — not even with “interactive” bells and whistles cobbled on top’. Agreed.

And the meat in the sandwich is his ‘Five-Point Plan for Reconnecting With Readers’ that recommends embracing transparency, raising unanswered questions, stopping the stenography (don’t cover non-events), providing greater journalistic accountability and ‘unleashing our readers’ voices.

And it’s on this point that his call for best practices comes in. Now I’m not an especially violent person, but I couldn’t agree more with Froomkin’s appeal ‘to move aggressively to adopt best practices in mass Internet participation’. But this plea, positioned in the penultimate paragraph, raises an unanswered question.

How?

Think about it. As Froomkin points out, traditional journalism practice needs to be reimagined for the new media disorder. But once you extend the rules to everyone posting content on the internet, you’re acknowledging that the idea of best practices needs to be embraced by more than just journalists. You’re advocating a culture where there’s media literacy for everyone, where discourse on blogs and social media takes place with a common understanding of the rules of engagement.

I don’t know if I can answer the question of how all this might be realised, but this much seems clear. Changing the media is not just about figuring out what to do about journalism. And choosing which best practices we need to move aggressively to adopt won’t just be determined by journalists. As Froomkin acknowledges, journalism can’t be renewed without participating in what’s going to be a much bigger and more inclusive discussion of who it’s for and what it might become.

Don’t you think?

Best practices in digital journalism – a conversation

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You don’t need me to tell you how quickly the world of journalism is changing. 

Yes, it’s pretty chaotic. But amidst the collapse of business models, and the ever-shifting habits of news consumption, is there room for optimism? Can the current upheavals lead to journalism that’s more accountable and informative, and that builds new kinds of relationships with audiences? And how should ethical principles be applied in an online environment where everyone’s a publisher?

These are big questions with no easy answers, but some interesting discussions are unravelling around them. Across different contintents, attempts to grapple with how to identify and foster emerging best practices in digital journalism are opening up conversations about ethics and excellence. I’ve examined some of these best practices initiatives for a conference paper I presented recently at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas. (I say a bit more about this on this blog’s about page.)

The focus on emerging best practices in digital journalism is gaining momentum. A few days after the ISOJ conference, the Columbia Journalism School launched a major research initiative to identify best practices. The mission of this blog is to draw attention to these initiatives and to contribute, with your input, to the conversation about how journalism can be renewed. Whether you’re a journalist, a journalism educator, a student, or someone who’s just interested in the media, you’re all invited to participate.

This blog’s natural home is upstart, the online magazine for emerging journalists, that was launched three years ago by our journalism program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. We’ll be tweeting through the @upstartmagazine handle and posting updates on the site’s Facebook page. You can find me on Twitter @lzion. More soon.

Lawrie Zion

Columbia Journalism School launches best practices research initiative

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The Columbia Journalism School recently announced a major research initiative to find best practices in digital journalism. The research will focus on three main areas:

  • Impact: measuring how new practices and tools affect audiences and newsroom resources;
  • Transparency in journalism: focusing on public data – what’s available, what’s not, and what’s useful and relevant to people’s lives;
  • Data visualization: examining which visuals work best in informing and engaging readers.

Commenting on the announcement in a blog post, the director of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Emily Bell, said that the initiative aims ‘to produce work which is widely accessible and immediately relevant to both those producing journalism and also those learning the skills of journalism’.

The research is being funded to the tune of $US2 million by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Tow Foundation. In a post about the announcement of the initiative, Bell said that full details of how and where to apply for funding will be announced in the coming weeks and months, ‘with the aim of having our first projects in place within the next few months. Anyone with initial thoughts and ideas can contact me, ebell@columbia.edu for further details.’

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