In the opening event of this year’s Festival of Democracy, SDN is excited to host a public lecture by co-founder and editor of The Conversation, Andrew Jaspan. Launched at a time of major upheavals within mainstream media, The Conversation is a unique initiative: a world’s first attempt to create a new type of web-based collaboration between academics and journalists, a not-for-profit commitment to publish materials with ‘academic rigour, journalistic flair’. Andrew Jaspan will share his thoughts about the emerging role of The Conversation, the 21st-century challenges it faces and the long-term public importance of open access information.

1. Sydney Festival of Democracy
The future of journalism & The Conversation
19 August 2014

2. Revealed: what really went wrong at Fairfax

4. Death by a 1000 cuts
• Redundancy round after redundancy round
• Take out specialists
• Take out subscriptions to papers and magazines
• Severely limit all travel: just use the phone
• Cut back foreign staff
• Reduce paginations
• Take out staples from tabloid sections (e.g. Epicure)
• Go tabloid
• Outsource production, pictures, etc
• Shut the canteen
• Shut the swtichboard
• Merge newsrooms: now SMH, Age and Fin all share
staff and content. 3 mastheads have become 1.
…And soon the paper won’t even be printed.
To retain profits….
Take costs out faster
than revenues fall:

5. Get out from inside the Ivory Tower

7. Commercial
media
Why we are different
Not for profit x
Authors recognised experts x
Content free to the public x
Free from commercial agenda x
Solution-centric x
Safe publishing platform x
Creative Commons, access to all x
New voices x

8. Ethical agenda
• Bound by Editorial
Charter
• Editorial Board oversight
• Final sign off for authors
• Author disclosure
statements, transparency
of funding

9. Who is reading The Conversation

10. Where our readers work

11. Group of Eight Universities on The Conversation

12. Viral spike:
And tweeted by
Richard Dawkins,
Ricky Gervais, Brian
Cox & others,

13. The Global Newsroom

14. Addressing global problems, together
• Ebola
• MH17
• Commonwealth Games
• Wicked problems: e.g. climate change,
ageing, lifestyle disease, privacy, food
security, water, democracy, corruption.

15. Where next for new global journalism?
• UK edition launched in May 2013.
• Indonesia editor appointed May 2014
• Plans for: US, India, Southern Africa, Netherlands, others…

16. The old information order: e.g. New York Times
Editors in New York
Bureaus staffed
by NYT staff
NYT bureau:
Europe
NYT bureau:
Africa
NYT bureau:
Asia
NYT bureau:
Middle East

17. The new information order: The Conversation model
Editors in AU + UK
Academics working together:
joint commissioning, sharing of research outcomes,
topics that require global input, curated by local editors

18. Malcolm Turnbull: “C’mon, get up to speed”
“The Australian media rarely
reports how different countries
have approached what are
usually shared and very familiar
issues that are topical in our own
country, even if the issue is
dominating the news…
“…Compare this to the business
world, which as long necessarily
been international”.

19. The Conversation
Academic rigour. Journalistic flair.