Description

Founded in Australia in 2011, The Conversation, an on-line publication, seeks to address the weaknesses of an increasingly market-driven fourth estate by discovering and disseminating the deep knowledge and insight often locked away inside higher education institutions. The Conversation’s editors commission articles for a general audience from academic specialists on current affairs, in such areas as politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, science and medicine, and the arts and culture.
 
The Conversation represents a new approach to the circulation of academic research: it invites professors to step outside of their specializations to speak directly to the public. This not only enriches the public discourse, it also re-legitimizes academia as an important source of knowledge and insight and re-affirms deep study as a critical precondition for informed analysis and commentary.
 
Since the US edition was launched in 2014, The Conversation has met with rapid success. It has enlisted 37 university partners, including the Universities of Washington, Maryland, Texas, Montana, and Michigan, as well as American University, Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Tufts, and Case Western Reserve. These partners contribute financially and facilitate access to their faculty, though they do not receive a publication preference. The Lilly Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others, have contributed significant support too.
 
The Luce Foundation’s Higher Education program also contributed a small grant to The Conversation US in 2016. We recognized that the publication represented a particularly promising effort to disseminate the work of university-based scholars to the general public. The Luce Foundation has consistently sought to make academic research accessible to policymakers, practitioners, and the general public—a value shared by founder Henry Luce and reflected in his magazines.
 
The previous grant of $35,000 supported the organization’s editorial operations. During the grant period, the organization made significant progress, expanding coverage, continuing to improve the quality of the writing, expanding readership, and increasing financial support. The Conversation US has also continued to expand its reach—both within the academy and to its audience. Since its founding, The Conversation US has published articles by 3500 scholars from 500 institutions; their work has been read 140 million times over the last two and half years.
 
Hundreds of thousands of these readers encounter The Conversation’s articles on other websites that re-publish them; since the Associated Press began including The Conversation in its feed to its subscribers, the publication has seen its readership increase significantly. All of The Conversation’s articles are published under a Creative Commons license, meaning that they can be reprinted by anyone at no cost.
 
A second grant will help The Conversation to build upon the solid foundation laid in the first years since its founding. This grant will continue to underwrite editorial costs and will also support The Conversation’s development of multimedia content—a crucial component of its efforts to deepen engagement with its readers and to attract new readers. Most of the grant monies will be used to support staff who will work on these initiatives.
 
TCUS spent $1.9 million in FY2016. Most of its funding is provided by foundations, some of which have been identified above. The balance comes from the university sponsors.
 
The Conversation was founded by Andrew Jaspan, a former newspaper editor in the UK and Australia. TCUS is headed by Maria Balinska, a former BBC radio reporter, producer and editor and Nieman Fellow and Bruce Wilson, former publisher of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Balinska will serve as the Principal Investigator on the grant.
 
The Luce Foundation made one previous grant to The Conversation.