Peter Preston' 

Andrew Jaspan and the sparkling conversation.com

Peter Preston: The former Observer editor may not make a fortune from website theconversation.com, but a forum for impressive reads in a disappointing world can only be a good thing
  
  

theconversation.com
theconversation.com Photograph: PR

What happens to Observer editors when they leave the chair? Some (Will Hutton) head an Oxford college; some (Jonathan Fenby) write brilliant books about China and France; some (Roger Alton) churn away in the heart of the Times; some (Donald Trelford) start a new family – he became a dad again last week, at 76. But Andrew Jaspan is different again.

Four years ago, in Australia, he devised and started theconversation.com. Just over a year ago, a London outpost (superintended by Stephen Khan, a Guardian alumnus) joined the party from what you can only describe as a concrete hut perched on the roof of City University. Not very BuzzFeed, but very much worth talking about in animated conversation.

It's a simple concept, crisply executed. Get sustaining grants from foundations, universities and research organisations, then tap the profound wells of knowledge within those organisations to produce a dozen or more brisk articles of analysis and explanation every morning.

Nearly 3,000 professors, lecturers and researchers have weighed in with pieces already. They do it unpaid, which helps to make their expertise available and relevant, dismantling the ivory towers of university life. And the result is increasingly impressive.

Here, on the morning after Scotland's first referendum debate, is Professor John Curtice from the University of Strathclyde with a definitive assessment. Here is the tangle of Iraq power unpicked by the great Paul Rogers from Bradford. Here is Bill Buchanan from Edinburgh Napier on an app that will get you into your hotel room late at night – and the professor of formal philosophy from Copenhagen University examining whether social media exposure changes the way we think.

The Conversation, marshalled by Khan and a team of 14 or so from their City eyrie, tries to offer "academic rigour with journalistic flair", and it often succeeds. It's a bright, essentially charitable idea that may be heading on to the US and the Pacific ring before long. Not 101 Ways To Make A Quick Buck, perhaps. But a mounting a new series of good deeds and good reads in a bad old world.

 

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