Letter from the Editor

As we hurtle towards the end of the year, we at The Conversation want to thank you: our readers, authors, supporters and university partners. You have sustained and allowed our service to develop and grow, both in Australia and globally. Please see our 2015 stakeholder report for a fuller summary of the year and what lies ahead.

And I hope you will allow me one quick reflection on how far we’ve come. In four years we have created the world’s largest virtual newsroom with nearly 30,000 specialist author-contributors from 1,500 universities working with 90 editors operating from five countries. Each month, we reach an audience of 2.7 million onsite and over 23 million through republication, with over 22,000 other media sites republishing our articles.

In May, we launched into Africa working with 9 countries based at the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg. In September, we launched into France, our first non-English language site, Based at the Sorbonne, Paris, we launched with the initial support of 33 universities. Our US site turned one in October, and the UK site goes from strength to strength with 62 university funding Members.

That global collaboration means we can provide better coverage of the global challenges we face – as we saw at the recent Paris climate summit, where we published analysis from more than 140 experts from 74 universities, reaching nearly 1 million readers. We’ve compiled a special package featuring our best articles looking Beyond Paris, which you can download a copy of here.

Our ambition remains simple: to provide the wider public with access to information with integrity. We do so through a unique collaboration between journalists and the university and research sector. Between us we offer a service that is timely, readable and freely available.

Before closing, may I ask for a very quick favour? We currently have just under 95,000 subscribers to our daily Newsletter. We’d like to get to 100,000 by the end of the year. So as an end of year/Christmas present to us, could you sign up a friend here: It’s a gift for life, and one they will remember and hopefully get use from every day…

I wish you a safe and enjoyable Christmas / holiday break and an “interesting” 2016.

Andrew Jaspan Editor.

P.S. You can order copies of our book ‘Politics, Policy + the Chance of Change’ here.