AoIR 2021

The Conversation, Ten Years On: Assessing the Impact of a Unique Scholarly Publishing Initiative

Presenters: Michelle Riedlinger (Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology), Alice Fleerackers (Scholarly Communications Lab, Simon Fraser University), Axel Bruns (Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology), Jean Burgess (Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology), Lars Guenther (Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg), Marina Joubert (CREST, Stellenbosch University), Kim Osman (Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology)

• 12-16 Oct. 2021 – panel presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, online  
• a longer video of the paper “The Conversation on Facebook: Patterns of Dissemination in Australia and Anglophone Canada” by Axel Bruns, Michelle Riedlinger, and Jean Burgess is also available
• full panel details, including abstracts for all papers in the panel, were published in Selected Papers of Internet Research

Video of the Panel

Panel Abstract

The Conversation (theconversation.com) represents a unique model for communicating scholarly research to the general public via explanatory journalism. Rather than relying on scholars’ personal networks, the promotional efforts of university press offices, or requests from science journalists for comments on current developments, The Conversation offers a platform for scholars across all disciplines to pitch their own stories, gain support from its in-house journalistic staff to develop those stories for a general audience, and see the resulting articles published under Creative Commons licences, enabling them to be republished by commercial and public service news outlets around the world. The overall success of this model, which may be described as ‘journalism-as-a-service’, is evident: articles from The Conversation are regularly republished by major international news outlets from the New York Times through CNN to The Guardian, as well as by domestic outlets across the eight countries and regions in which The Conversation now operates.

The tenth anniversary of the publication’s launch in Melbourne, Australia, in March 2011 provides a suitable opportunity to assess the extent to which The Conversation has achieved its stated aims, and to examine the challenges it continues to face. In addition to the Australian edition, The Conversation now publishes to audiences in the UK, US, France, Spain, Africa, Indonesia, Anglophone as well as Francophone Canada, and New Zealand, and produces a generic ‘Global Perspectives’ edition that draws content from all regional and national versions; it employs more than 100 editors across its global network, and it attracted nearly 750 million article visits in 2020 alone (Ketchell, 2021). Yet the different academic, social, media, and political environments within which these editions operate, as well as their diverging organisational structures and publishing track records, mean that considerable variations between these editions remain; for instance, the longest-running and best-established national edition the Australian Conversation must now carefully prioritise which story pitches from scholars it can accommodate, whereas other more recently launched offshoots are still working to attract submissions from local scholars, and to gain the trust of domestic audiences, academic institutions, and media partners. Similarly, the different national academic systems that The Conversation engages with emphasise the publication of scholarly work to varying degrees, and domestic media audiences may similarly seek out evidence-based scholarly perspectives to differing extents.

Drawing on contributions from scholars across a wide range of academic systems and traditions, this panel assesses the success and impact of The Conversation in its tenth year from a number of angles. First, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the need for accessible, clearly communicated scientific knowledge about the virus, as well as medical and public health responses to it; at the same time, early-stage research is emerging rapidly against a broad context of uncertainty. In the first paper in this panel, we investigate the relative amplification across social media platforms of articles in The Conversation containing links to research preprints related to COVID-19, exploring how social media users are engaging with and negotiating the (un)certain nature of this early-stage research.

Second, we continue our focus on the social media impact of The Conversation by assessing the circulation of its content on public Facebook pages in Australia and Anglophone Canada. This compares the oldest national edition of The Conversation with its youngest, and pays particular attention to whether, in each domestic context, the publication has achieved its aim to translate scholarly insights to a broad general audience, or whether its content circulates unevenly amongst the Facebook userbase. We assess this particularly by examining the sharing of Conversation articles alongside other domestic news content, which provides a proxy for the sharing pages interests and ideologies.

Third, we examine the extent to which The Conversation’s African edition is able to serve as an agenda-setter for both mainstream and social media debates in the region. Drawing on internal data from The Conversation on content republication in journalistic outlets and content sharing on Facebook and Twitter, we investigate how these different media have engaged with content published in TC Africa, and find considerable differences in the topical areas they emphasise: journalistic media drew predominantly on political and economic coverage in The Conversation, while social media users tended to amplify its coverage of social and societal issues.

Fourth, we combine internal Conversation data, Facebook engagement, and the outcomes of a series of interviews with scholars from Australia and Canada who have published in The Conversation to review the experience of publishing scholarly insights for a general audience, and examine whether there are particular patterns in the themes, topics, and disciplines that attract the greatest amount of engagement. This provides new insights into the success of The Conversation in amplifying scientific expertise and supporting the public communication goals of scholars and their institutions.

Taken together, the panel provides a broad-ranging and multi-faceted assessment of the status of the Conversation project, in its tenth year of operation. The current COVID-19 crisis has particularly highlighted the crisis of expertise and unevenness of scientific literacy amongst journalists, politicians, and the general public. The panel’s assessment of the successes and failures of one of the leading digital science communication initiatives of the past decade provides an important reality check, and offers new insights on what can be done to increase the visibility and impact of rigorous scholarly perspectives from all disciplines of research in public and political debates.

References

Ketchell, Misha. 2021, 25 March. The Conversation Story: Celebrating 10 Years of News from Experts. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-conversation-story-celebrating-10-years-of-news-from-experts-157593