Did you know The Conversation’s UK edition attracts a global audience of 14 million? It’s an extremely powerful way of boosting your academic profile and getting your research ‘out there’.
The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered to the public. Professional editors at The Conversation work with academics to help deliver their knowledge to inform the general public.
Content on The Conversation is published under a Creative Commons licence, which means it can be freely republished by other media. It is currently republished in 97 countries and in 30 different languages.
Get involved!
Editors from The Conversation will be ‘coming’ to Southampton to run an online media training session on Zoom, open to all but particularly directed at the University’s academic community.
The session will provide background on The Conversation and how it works, plus advice on how to pitch to – and write for – the publication.
The media training session will take place on Wednesday 20 October from 2pm to 4pm. You can register here.
If you can’t make that date, the event will be repeated on Friday 3 December from 10.30am to 12.30pm. Register for the December event here.
Question: Why should I get involved?
Answer: To share your knowledge, inform the public, contribute to the discussion and, ultimately, to raise your profile.
Dr Ivan Haigh, Associate Professor in Coastal Oceanography and expert in all things related to sea level, has written for The Conversation and achieved great results.
He said: “Writing for The Conversation helped me to step up my public engagement and get my work ‘out there’, which has had a lot of benefits in terms of the impact of my research. Through this, I have had the opportunity to do a lot more consultancy work for the Environment Agency, and I was able to submit an Impact Case Study to the REF.
“It is helpful to be able to communicate my science with non-experts – writing for a general audience really helps with this. And it’s also extremely satisfying to see an article published and to see the reads clock up, especially when one of my pieces went viral.”
Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health based in the Clinical Informatics Research Unit, has had great success in writing for The Conversation since COVID-19 hit, due to his expertise in infectious disease. To date, his articles on The Conversation have had 1.2 million reads around the world.
Dr Head said: “Articles for The Conversation are 800 words long, so they are a pleasure to write, and the editors at The Conversation are very good at making sure everything you say is unambiguous and suitable for the general public. Your articles can be picked up and republished all round the world, so your work can take off above and beyond the readership you were expecting. I’ve been contacted by journalists off the back of pieces I’ve written, so it can bring opportunities beyond the 800 word article.
“Writing articles for The Conversation is helpful, particularly when speaking to policymakers and decision makers – they don’t necessarily want to see an academic paper, so it’s helpful to have a version of your research that’s more accessible. Your research also achieves impact through The Conversation – it’s good for the academic on an individual level, but also good for the University’s profile.”
