In a global society where the 24-hour news cycle dictates the way we consume our media, we have grown to expect news and analysis to be delivered instantaneously from all over the world. With the pressure to constantly break news, have live updates and keep the public ‘informed’, critical analysis, investigative journalism and sometimes even facts go by the way side.
This is evident in recent media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings; The New York Post and members of Reddit incorrectly featured and shared an image of Boston teenager, Salah Eddin Barhoum, thus associating him with the bombings, leaving him the target for unwarranted vitriol. Meanwhile CNN and the Associated Press, “the world’s oldest and largest news gathering organization” (according to their website), incorrectly reported ‘breaking news’ that a suspect had been arrested.
It is within this vacuum that The Conversation has flourished. With over 840,000 independent visits a month it has quickly overtaken other independent news sites like Crikey to become Australia’s largest news and commentary site in its two years of existence. Based in Melbourne, on the principle of free information to underpin a healthy democracy, the site has a contributor base of over 5,000 writers sourced from over 300 universities from Australia and around the world.
According to Peter Doherty, Nobel Laureate and former Australian of the Year, “Within the Australian Universities we have an enormous depth of expertise and talent…If we take anything from economics, to engineering, to marine biology to astrophysics, people who can speak authoritatively on what is happening there can be found within our universities. What we need is a well regarded and well edited website that will allow the general public to access that information and those insights.” The Conversation is this website.
Academic writing is often dismissed as too difficult to understand and academics are subsequently perceived to be elitist. But The Conversation acknowledges that the expertise of people who have spent their lives gathering information is an invaluable contribution to popular discourse. To bridge the gap between the academic and the general public, content is edited by professional journalists and editors to make it more accessible.
The organisation is not-for-profit, with all content free to access. This stands against the current trend, with most of the mainstream media moving towards pay walls. This philosophy is also seen in the sharing of the website’s content: all work is published with creative commons licensing, meaning that it can be easily re-published by anyone in the world without infringing copyright.
Managing Editor Misha Ketchell acknowledges that not every academic or researcher will necessarily want, or be able to communicate, their ideas to a wider public audience.
However, “at the end of the day, universities are public institutions that serve the public good and their role is to contribute to society more broadly; whether that be by communicating about the research they are doing, or new ideas to informing public discussion about topical issues,” he said.
The Fact Check series is one way that the knowledge-base and research capacity of academics is effectively utilised. They are set the task of taking a comment made in the mainstream media and checking its accuracy, thus positively contributing to the public discourse. The first of these was run in January this year when Warren Truss, leader of the National Party and acting opposition leader at the time, claimed that “there’ll be more CO2 emissions from these fires than there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades.”
Philip Gibbons, a senior lecturer at Australian National University who specialises in forestry management and environment, checked the statement and found that Truss’ claims were entirely inaccurate.
He said that the fires would need to “burn an area of forest the size of New South Wales to generate CO2 emissions equivalent to a decade of burning coal for electricity”.
It seems almost dangerous not to utilise this kind of resource. Academics are often well-positioned to judge if what is being discussed in the public sphere is to the detriment of popular opinion. “I think it’s really valuable to have people who actually know what they are talking about involved in public debate,” Ketchell said. “We’ve had too few of them up until now”.
The academic voice in the media is something desirous in and of itself, not only in the sense of articles and commentary, but also by creating a media-savvy talent pool of experts for the mainstream media to draw from, creating conversations which may never have arisen without the nuance that comes from years of study and research. However, the current media landscape is such that there’s a certain ironic sense in which we have to ‘shop around’ to find credible and reliable commentary; especially as newspapers and other forms of old media become increasingly agenda driven. Nowhere else could this be more contemptuous than in the media, the societal construct that is meant to keep all others in check. However, this is a reflection of the shortcomings of news consumers, as to a greater extent it is us, the consumer who buys the paper or clicks on the link which drives the media monster.
The Conversation has the capacity to inform the broader community at large, but without our engagement with the ideas it brings to the table, may never hold the clout of more mainstream publications.
It is an uphill battle; online media has a tendency to create niche markets, in the sense that like-minded people can easily congregate in the inter-web, not looking to challenge their own opinions. But independent media is growing, while newspaper circulation rates decline, so perhaps the media is not as doomed as we may think.
