Do you dabble in journalism? Is it a string you would like to add to your bow? You should approach The Conversation, the online magazine entirely written by academics for a mainstream audience, writes Steven Vass, Scotland Editor at The Conversation. 

With an audience of 23m and a mission to explain the world from an expert point of view, we run short sharp analysis on everything from the Holocaust to the Large Hadron Collider, from the Chinese economy to the sex lives of bats.

Not only do we offer a global audience across five editions in the UK, France, North America, Africa and Australasia, our creative commons policy means any media outlet can republish our material free of charge – so long as they credit you and don’t change anything. Writing for us is frequently a route into appearing in household names like The Guardian, Washington Post and Newsweek.  

Yet unlike most publications, we have a two-way editing process that requires you to approve a final draft before we can publish – not just the main text but also the title, pictures, captions and every last dot and comma.

This ensures you retain control over what you want to say. You also get access to detailed metrics about your article, including readership numbers and sharing activity on social media. It’s useful stuff for demonstrating public impact, and an anorakish pleasure in its own right.

In all cases, we’re looking to tell our audience something they don’t know already. But don’t worry if you’re not sure how that applies to your expertise. I’m one of a team of around 20 editors in the UK whose job is to help writers identify what will work best. I’m on campus regularly and always happy to chat on the phone or over coffee. 

We work with everyone from PhD researchers to professors. If you have an idea or would like to find out more, drop me a line at steven.vass@theconversation.com. 

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First published: 29 September 2015

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