If The Conversation has proven anything in its decade-plus of existence, it’s that its model is replicable. The nonprofit outlet has built a brand on connecting the knowledge of professors and researchers to both the news cycle and a general audience — a combination it calls “Academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Those raw ingredients exist everywhere, and from its base in Australia, The Conversation has built out editions across the globe, from Brazil (“Rigor acadêmico, estilo jornalístico”) to Quebec (“L’expertise universitaire, l’exigence journalistique”) to Spain (“Rigor académico, oficio periodístico”) to Indonesia (“Disiplin ilmiah, gaya jurnalistik”).
But could it also work on a sub-national level — in a city or state — and try to make a dent, however small, in the local news crisis?
That’s the idea behind The Conversation Local, an initiative that celebrated its first birthday on January 1. In four markets across the U.S., a small team has been connecting experts at local universities to local issues and distributing their work for free to dozens of local news outlets — most in those markets, but sometimes beyond.
“We feel like we’re meeting our mission if we can connect a scholar to a reporter, or to an editor, or to their audience,” said Emily Costello, The Conversation U.S.’s director of collaborations and local news.
Some examples of what they’ve produced:
Like all stories at The Conversation, these and other local pieces are available for any outlet to republish without cost. In the initiative’s first year, the 150 local outlets to do so have ranged from metro dailies (Denver Post, Detroit Free Press, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer) to digital native outlets (Billy Penn, Michigan Advance, Planet Detroit, Apopka Voice), with a sprinkling of ethnic media, public radio stations, and others.
Costello said one impetus of the project was the governing environment after the Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade and pushed a lot of legislative decision-making down to the states: “We started thinking about covering politics more on a state level, and once we started playing with the idea, we realized that a lot of the stories that we do nationally at The Conversation would also benefit from a local take on them.” They also saw that some Conversation stories would cover a new piece of research that was driven by data from a specific community — but those findings often weren’t being distributed back to the places that made them possible.
The initiative is funded by a three-year, $1.27 million grant from the Knight Foundation. It launched in January 2024 in four markets — Colorado, Philadelphia, Detroit, and South Florida. (Colorado was initially focused specifically on Boulder, but the small media market there limited options and it shifted more statewide.)
The team began with a lot of conversations with local editors in each market, asking what holes they saw in their own coverage that academics might help fill. Topics like housing policy, K-12 education research, and environmental health came up often — the sort of beats a good metro paper would have had staff to throw at 20 years ago but which often fall between the cracks today. Local Conversation staffers in each community are in charge of connecting with local universities, identifying potential stories, and matching professors to topics.
“We’ve found that some outlets don’t really care as much about the topic being local as much as the expert being local — wanting to have local scholars on their site,” Costello said. “But other times, it’s a story written by a researcher elsewhere that can be localized for that community.” Sometimes those connections can happen far outside the core markets, like the recent piece that landed on 26 Gannett front pages on the same day.
There’s a customer service piece, too — taking requests from individual editors looking for someone to write about a particular issue, or even helping smaller publications out with art to accompany stories. (The Conversation Local started a private Flickr account to provide photos outlets can run with pieces.)
After an initial ramp-up, the initiative now aims to produce six stories a week across the four markets. Given that the average Conversation piece is republished in roughly 20 outlets, those pieces can have a wider reach. (And a large share of the academics who write those pieces end up being approached by other media, like local public radio, to talk further about their work.)
Right now, most story ideas start with the local Conversation editors, but over time they hope to generate more ideas from both editors at local outlets and local academics. In Detroit, they’re experimenting with a local advisory board of editors to propose ideas and offer feedback. “I really want to do more work that is specifically requested by local media, so we’re just exploring different ways to make that happen,” Costello said. That will also include producing a co-branded series of stories with an outlet in each market.
While she’s been at The Conversation since 2015, much of Costello’s background is in local media in the Boston suburbs, and she currently sits on the board of Winchester News, a startup in the town she lives in. “I get the challenges small startups face trying to fill this void of local news,” she says. “So this is our little attempt to support them in our Conversation way.”
Illustration via Midjourney.
