A platform that promises academic rigour and journalistic flair is marking a major milestone, and making plans for bigger things to come.
Photo: The Conversation
Newshub’s Patrick Gower was all over the media last week talking about his publicly-funded documentary Patrick Gower On Booze.
Recognising plenty of other people also have alcohol problems, Three aired a live 90-minute discussion the next night in which experts and community leaders also had their say.
Newsroom.co.nz co-editor Mark Jennings - a former news boss at TV3 - pointed out experts talking in primetime on New Zealand TV is rare these days. And in spite of Covid, climate change and conflict on the rise, our main channels have mostly "stuck with light entertainment," he said.
Helping expert voices to cut through in the media was partly of what prompted experienced Australian newspaper editor Andrew Jaspan to set up The Conversation a decade ago.
The online outlet backed by Australian universities was designed publish academics’ expertise in topical and timely articles for free.
It's since taken off in eight other countries from 2012 onwards - including New Zealand.
Five years ago this week, The Conversation NZ was fired up an offshoot of the Aussie operation with just one editor: ex-RNZ science specialist Veronika Meduna.
Five years later she’s now in a team of three that's backed by all eight NZ universities - and led by former Listener magazine and Penguin Books editor Finlay MacDonald.
That boost seems to be paying off.
Finlay MacDonald, senior editor for The Conversation NZ. Photo: supplied
Finlay MacDonald told Mediawatch its greatest hits were an article by Massey University leadership researcher Suze Wilson analysing Jacinda Ardern's Covid leadership that amassed more than 1.7 million unique reads - and one on the eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcano in Tonga by Auckland University volcanologist Shane Cronin, was read more than a million times.
That's possible because The Conversation make all articles available for free to other media outlets under a Creative Commons license.
"Sometimes we will get extraordinarily high reads on our own website and platform. But very often, it's when the likes of RNZ and other media organisations in New Zealand and overseas pick it up that the numbers start to climb."
That means media outlets get clickable but credible content, while the institutions bankrolling The Conversation see their academics' expertise amplified outside the ivory towers.
However that creates a dilemma now familiar the news media: the temptation of click-hunting.
"I think all journalists should avoid being a slave to clicks. That's a one way trip to media hell, really," Macdonald said. "But we're all slaves to the algorithm to some extent."
Macdonald said he avoids that trap by focusing more on what the academics can contribute to the public conversation, and how they can help fill gaps in newsrooms' coverage.
"Resources are squeezed. Newsrooms are smaller. It's just harder to to run the kind of operations that I learned my journalistic chops in, when advertising was a 'river of gold'. For news organisations, The Conversation is a lovely, reliable source of quality content."
In the coming years, he wants to see its service expand outside the most heavily-canvassed areas of politics, science, and health.
"I want to see more in the arts and humanities and be able to develop a broader stable of authors," he said. "That's our longer-term planning."
