This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, We share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. We are really excited today to get to speak to Beth Daly, who is the executive editor and general manager at The Conversation. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for climate reporting at the Boston Globe. She also worked at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting as a reporter and director of partnerships. And as director of strategic development at Inside Climate, she worked to diversify the Pulitzer Prize winning news outlets revenue stream. 
And Daly was also a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University. So Beth, thanks for being here. And as I mentioned to you before, one of the reasons I was thinking of having you on as a guest is that I know so many academics who have loved writing for The Conversation. For our listeners who've never heard of this podcast, called The Conversation. Can you tell us what it is? Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm so thrilled to be on. So The Conversation's mission in its purest form is, and it's somewhat lofty, is to democratize knowledge for the public good. The way we do that is a twofold. We believe so much research is happening in academia that simply never gets to the public. 
They're locked away in obscure journals and Quite honestly, the higher ed ecosystem doesn't quite reward public engagement as an avenue for promotion and tenure, although that's changing slowly. So what happened was we said two things were happening. We saw this sort of research locked away in academia. At the same time, we saw a crisis in media, that journalism was tanking, the advertising that used to carry newspapers to be so profitable left when the internet did. And there's not a lot of reporters anymore who have expertise and there's not a lot of reporters in general. So we said, hey, what if we looked at all the academics in the country as the reporters? They're expert and they know what they're talking about. They have done decades of research on things. 
Why don't we get them to write the stories? But we learned a truth in that process. This is not all academics, but many academics are used to writing for other academics and not for the general public. And so we have a team of about 22 editors, very subject specific, who collaborate with those scholars to teach them how to write for the general public and policymakers to so they can really read their research and digestible English. So I'm wondering if, you know, besides academics, because we do read the conversation, do you know who else or how else would you describe your readers? Yeah, so it's quite interesting. I think I should take a step back and explain our distribution model and then tell you a little bit about our readers. 
So every day we publish about 10 to 12 stories. Many of those stories or ideas would come up internally at a daily news meeting. And we go out, seek scholars to write them experts. At the same time, we get hundreds of pitches each week from scholars all around the country. I discovered a new color blue. I have something to say about the, the, the, you know, Israeli Hamas war, those kinds of things. But when we publish our stories, they go on our website, which is wonderful. And about, um, Maybe four to five million people come to our website every month. But the real power of the conversation is that all our stories are Creative Commons, which means they are allowed for anyone to read and republish. 
So every month, about a thousand news outlets republish stories in the conversation. Not every story. Everything from the Washington Post, Scientific American, World Economic Forum, LA Times, but also Yahoo News, the tiny Kitsap Sun in Washington State, Pops the Tiny Spirit in Pennsylvania. A lot of the local news. outlets that no longer have those expert journalists anymore. And it kind of does two things. I mean, one, scholars really connect to the public because they're writing in plain language. And every story they write tends to be in 15 to 20 news outlets. So if you write a story for the conversation, it's likely to show up in 15 to 20 news outlets, which ones I can't promise. But that's what happens. Yeah, and the news outlets are thrilled to have the content because it's so good. 
It's based on expertise. That's great. I don't think I'd realize that sometimes stories do make it out to other publications. How are you making that happen at the conversation? Or you're sharing it somehow? Or how does that work? Yeah, great question. It's all technology. But our content has been rated so highly that we were accepted by the Associated Press Newswire. So all our content goes on the Associated Press. And if people don't know about the Associated Press, they have clients virtually most of the big... news outlets in the country, but also lots of small ones as a news media consolidates. Like, for example, USA Today has hundreds of papers. So it goes to them. So they pick up our stuff. But we also have a three-person outreach team who literally calls up, you know, Route 50 or World Economic Forum or Houston Chronicle says, hey, we have a story you might be really interested in because we know, you know, your distribution. 
And the news outlet will say yes or no. And they'll pick it up. And it's just a button you press actually on our website to republish. And it's pretty easy. And we know how many people read us because when news outlets carry our stories, at least digitally, we ask them to carry an embed code so we can actually see in real time. And so can the scholar in the university who's picking up the story. So, hey, Fast Company picked it up. And, hey, look, now Washington Post. And, you know, we had 4,000 readers on that site and this site. In total, as I said, about 1,000 news outlets pick us up every month, and we have about 15 to 18 million readers, which is a really nice reach. 
Yeah, no, now I'm really understanding why this is very exciting for scholars who usually don't get a chance to meet that, to reach that many readers, and also to see actually the numbers is very fun, too. You mentioned the word pitch before, that the conversation receives all these pitches. This is a term, I mean, if I'm an academic who's only written for academic journals or, you know, made proposals to conferences, I have done a thing called an abstract, but I might be confused about is a pitch like an abstract or how is it different? Great question. Again, it's, so our pitch is for, it's on our website. It's very easy. Just scroll down on the homepage, theconversation.com and you'll see on the right hand and say, tell us about a story. 
And the pitch is very simple. It says like, if you were going to write a headline for your story, what would it be? you know, and tell us in 50 words, like what your story is about. Like, why is it relevant? Why is it timely? And the last question we ask is why you, why are you the expert? Like what gives you the right? Because sometimes we get a lot of scholars writing in areas where they're not quite honestly equipped to write. So we really want to make sure you have an expertise. It's our secret sauce. And the pitch process, I hope would take no one more than five to seven minutes to fill out a pitch. It goes into our system. It's rooted to the, 
specific editor who covers it. So if you're science and technology or if you're arching cultures, politics, religion, just like a legacy newspaper, every editor reviews every pitch in detail, which is a lot of time. And they will say, yes, we'll accept it or no, we won't. Or yes, let's talk it through a little bit. Your research is really interesting, but maybe we can find out something a little different, a new angle to go into your work than the one you propose. So it's a very hands-on experience. Yeah. And the form that you have on the conversation is so great because as you were describing, it breaks down what a pitch should be, often what a cover letter should be. If, you know, if you're that email you send to a magazine editor, you know, in terms of what's so newsworthy about this and why you. 
That makes me wonder, is relevance important? Sort of, I mean, timeliness of subject matter. Does your topic need to carry that? Yeah, yeah, yes. We like, I'd say like 70% of the time we like relevance. We want our secret sauce, in addition to having scholars write, is that we're kind of, we're breaking research news. So we're finding things that has not been covered by other press in the research journals. And that's, we break news and other news outlets follow us. But for the most part, what we provide is context analysis and explanatory journalism on the news of the day. So for example, when you, the war in Ukraine started, we had a piece from a, I think the link about appropriation, like what, why do people call it the Ukraine as opposed to Ukraine? 
You know, like these questions that are in people's mind, we just had an explainer yesterday on S and P just because no one even knows the history of how it started. So we do a lot of explainers. We do a lot of, a lot of political analysis as well. And a lot of cool science stories like, you know, new discovery of a spider in Florida or, you know, the Python problem, like new efforts to capture them in Southern Florida or whatever. So yeah, it really runs a gamut. And the explainer, that's a term for a certain kind of article. Yeah, it's explainer. We have lots of different types of stories, at least internally, that maybe scholars may not realize and may not need to know. 
But for example, we have things called significant terms. We explain a significant term through the scholar's expertise or significant figure. Like, did you know X number of people are homeless? Or did you know, I don't know, the world population is X. And then we, you know, we kind of explain it from a point of view, but we ask scholars, don't worry about that. We really just want them to pitch the idea. Like the idea is a currency and their expertise. And then we figure out how to, how to, I'm so sorry for that noise. We can figure out how to, you know, appropriately put it in the right, in the right bucket. For some humanity scholars, like, like myself, we're often dealing with writers, books from an earlier era. 
I'm pretty into the mid-20th century, the immediate post-World War II period. And so I do occasionally like to write popular pieces, but they're probably more in the vein of, you know, this is why it's important or maybe even relevant to to read this author again, to revisit this book, to discover it for the first time, even though you've never heard of this book that was popular in the 1940s or whatever it might be. So those are the kind of topics that don't seem to have a timeliness, although I suppose when I do them, I'm trying to hook them around an anniversary. It's been 30 years since it was a bestseller or since it won whatever prize or became a movie. Is that type of – those types of pieces – 
of interest of the conversation? They really are. You know, the one thing we have a great arts and culture editor who, you know, we really need like four arts and culture editors, but one thing we do is do book recommendations, but it tends, that's where you probably want it around like interesting summer reading, or, I mean, I hate to be so sometimes you need a hook or anniversaries are really powerful and, We've recommended books for parents a lot too, as well as, and one thing we've never done, which I think now that you've said it makes me think maybe you want like recommendations for like college students or people interested in this particular subject. Like here's what I think you should read. And the idea of discovery from the past is really stories do so well because in an understanding like the news of the day, people want to insight into the past, into literature that they may not have heard of or, you know, 
want to re-explore through a different lens that they may not have. So yeah, I love that idea. Yeah, that's good to hear. I mean, I suppose I was asking in part because as I mentioned to you before, I'm working on this piece with one of your editors that I had pitched and it's about a tree grows in Brooklyn, some archival research I had done. And I sort of broke off a piece that I thought would work well for something more popular. And I was like, well, what's my timeliness hook? And I, you know, sort of have the anniversary of its being popular that, you know, I put that in the lead. And I think in communicating with the editor, he was also like, is there, you know, is there any kind of timeliness hook we can do? 
And I think we, we settled on this anniversary idea, but it seemed like he was mostly sort of sold on the, the content like this does make the case well for why it's worth revisiting. But, you know, that's generally how I'm doing the, the popular sort of pieces. This is a, a, book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, that many people have heard of, but not everyone has read and sort of like, wait, why was that important? And was it popular? And, you know, why was it received the way it was at its time? So I was wondering if that was unusual, or if that that is the type of thing that you sometimes do. I think you just experience a very typical editor, author interaction. 
You know, I love that, by the way. So the editors, they really edit, like, I just want, Folks, if they think about writing for the conversation, we don't want fully formed pieces because it is a collaboration. We want you to trust us and we trust your expertise. Trust us to know what will work in the popular press to the extent it will. And it doesn't always, but we do really well. And so I'd say the most common question editors give scholars are like, hey, why would someone want to read it? tomorrow or next week or last week you know like what why you know and sometimes there isn't an answer and quite honestly i'm i'm less wedded to that i'm someone who likes discovering things just for reading them but i i don't think that's the case for a lot of republishers i think they're looking for hook oh it's i hate this it's black history many stories you know like which sometimes that feels i don't know a little contrived but but it is what it is so 
Yeah, and that opportunity to be edited is a big deal for academics. It's something that's come up in a lot of our conversations here, how rare it is for academics to be publishing in a place where they feel like they're really getting that attention and that they really benefit from that, which leads me to my question of in what ways you think your academic writers are benefiting? I guess this is a what do they get out of this kind of question? Yeah. No, it's great because quite honestly, and this is like, I don't try with the hard questions, like we don't pay our academics. Like, in fact, universities, while we're independent, we partner very closely with universities like the University of Florida because they care so much that their academics get out and become public scholars. 
So let me tell you a couple of benefits. The first is just learning how to communicate ideas to the public. I can't tell you how many emails I get from scholars or to the editors, not to me all the time. saying, like, my mother didn't know what I did, and now she does, you know, because, like, I was able to write it down. It was logical. I wasn't using the academic speak, which I often do. The other thing is that we do a lot of post-story follow-up with the scholars. So while you can see how many people read the story, it's always more than that because not every news outlet carries a counter. But over 75% are subsequently asked to be on like a public radio station or some sort of broadcast interview. 
I mean, that's kind of stunning. Like if you think you write a story and let's say it gets 20,000 reads, but then you're like, oh, look, I'm going to be on the local NPR station about this idea. 10% get asked to write books. I don't know how many actually write the books, but they are contacted. 21% said they influence policy. They were trying to understand what that means a little bit. It means very different things for different people. So I don't have great insight into that. But most of all, scholars say I learned how to communicate my ideas publicly. And so when I go on NPR, when I go on a local ABC station, I feel like I'm able to communicate much more succinctly. 
Yeah, a really important skill. And do you hear from readers at all, you know, how, what the conversation is doing for them? A lot. Yeah, we do. I mean, because we... We have about 220,000 people on our newsletters list. So we have a daily newsletter. Then we have lots of other newsletters like science and science, politics, thinking or hope to start a books and ideas section, but don't have the funding for that yet. So we hear back from those loyal readers who really care enough to sign up for the conversation, say, hey, we love the story. You know, it's so nuanced. We just get emails coming in to individual editors saying thank you for that story. I mean, into our... portal. There's a lot of comments, like because our stories go out in so many different ways to so many news outlets, people comment on the stories a lot, like in the post or other places. 
So we know people are reading them. We do a reader survey as well. Yeah. Readers really appreciate it. We hear more from the authors though, just because we have more direct contact with them, but we probably get 20 reader emails, let's say maybe every five days or so. And with your writers, it sounds like some of them are repeat writers, right? Why are people doing multiple pieces of the conversation? I think because they feel the impact is, is really powerful and they, you know, some of them have a new book out, they want to get it out. The best story I have to say, like, I'm so, I was so happy. I was down, I'm a juror, juror of a science communication award in science at the National Academies of Engineering, Medicine and Engineering. 
Sorry. And, They held this big award ceremony about two weeks ago at National Academies in D.C. And of like the 21 winners or so, one one professor came up to me from Brown. He said, well, I don't know. And he he's like, I just want to thank you for thank the conversation for launching my public scholarship career. I've gotten grants because of it. You know, I won this award because you showed me how to write for the general public. I have a very popular podcast now. And it just made me feel like really good because you see the long tail of what we can do for people. And it's not for everyone, I'm going to be honest with you. You have to have a certain sense of humility to be, and most scholars do, to say like, okay, I'm going to open up my writing and my ideas to reconstruction in some way. 
And some people don't want to do that. That's fine. There's lots of op-eds and news outlets for them to reach out to. Yeah, but that is great to hear that it opens up new opportunities and avenues for people for academics who don't, we don't always feel like we have that many options open to us. So that's really valuable. There's a couple of questions we've been asking all guests. One of them is about something you wish you had known earlier about writing. But in your case, I wonder if you might think about this from the perspective of your writers, if you have sort of observed writers having discovered something about the writing and publishing process. that you think has been helpful or changed things for them? 
Yeah, I was thinking about that question and I was like, personally, I know because I wrote for so many years, it was very painful. But I mean, I love it, but it's always... So, but for the academic, for the academics, one thing I've definitely heard and I've definitely seen is that many people I've talked to, scholars say, I didn't realize I could be accurate and simple at the same time. Sort of a... Odd thing to say, but I think, and I do too, like you get, I was a science reporter and I got, I got an climate reporter. I got wedded to the words of, of that academic area. And I was proud of it. Like I knew what people were talking about. 
I wanted to use those words too, because it got me accepted and heard by academia, but it didn't, didn't win any, it wasn't, there were no wins in the court of public opinion. So, and I see that with the academics are like, oh yeah, I don't have to say myriad. I mean, this is very tiny, but like, I don't have to say myriad. I can say many, you know, like, I mean, very simple, simple things that you don't realize slow the reader down, but it just may, because we're really shooting for like New York Times level, which is kind of a 10th grade level, actually. People sometimes are surprised by that, but that's what it is. So yeah, I hear that a lot. 
And the other thing is more, not so much of a writing, but academics sort of through the conversation is that, this isn't your only shot at writing something. So many people try to like shove in a lot of ideas into a story. And look, we are publishing 800 or 1,000 words. That's our average length. And we like to go shorter. We want the reader to walk away with like one idea in their head. And I think I've heard a lot of feedback from academics that that's been very useful for them that don't have to see the conversation articles encompassing all their work, just one piece of it. And then they can write again. I think that's also why people try writing again. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things I love about this more public popular writing is that I can sort of break off a little piece of the research and one nice thing on its own works for this kind of writing, as opposed to I think often in the journal articles that we do, there's supposed to be lots of different threads, you know, or we need lots of support for each argument, and it ends up being a little more dense and complicated. 
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's totally true. Yeah, I can't wait to see your, I can't wait to see your article. Thanks. The other question that we've been asking is if there is a writing practice or habit that's working for you. So I don't know if you're, if you have time to do much writing these days or around people who do. Yeah, I write, no, I do. I write, I mean, I write poetry and I'm like trying to get on a moth radio. So I'm writing different things and You know, and I write blogs and things like that. So I'm trying different kinds of writing. And so the only thing I have learned, which works for me, although like 50 percent of it I throw away or more, is that I write every day, like literally every day. 
Like it doesn't matter what I write, but it's like the habit of writing, I think, is so strong. And once you're out of it, you never have time for it. It's like, oh, no, I have to, you know, I have to, I don't know, make dinner or watch the kids or, you know, like, but there's always time. to do that. And I, so I do that first thing in the morning and it's 20 minutes or something, but it really, it gets me thinking that I get excited when I'm going to bed, like, what am I going to write tomorrow? And, you know, see. Yeah, no, this seems like a very popular one with our guests. Thanks, Beth. Is there anything else you want to share with us about, about your experience at the conversation or, or what you've noticed among academics, sort of their, their challenges or their wins in, in writing these kinds of pieces? 
I think just like from a 30,000 foot, I mean, right now, I mean, let's face it, academia is under a lot of pressure and a lot of distrust in the public and local media is under a lot of stress and mistrust in the public. And I truly believe that, I really hope that people listening pitch and want to write for the conversation. We don't accept every pitch, so you have to accept rejection too. But this idea where we can really make the community and the community the public realize the immense value that research brings to our lives every day. And I just think that's like so important. And I keep every, every year I'm here, I'm like, I believe it more and more. 
So I'm really grateful for all the amazing academics who write and who go on to keep talking. And did you mention earlier that you sometimes speak to universities or university audiences about how to do this more public writing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we, I do. And our editors do. We, we go around and just, just, it's like, it's more like evangelizing, like, Hey, it's really important, you know? And, and certainly we're talking on a, on a national level to various, you know, research councils and whatnot and, and academic associations to, to get, to do that, get their scholars to, to, to do this as well. And yeah, we, we talk a lot and give it a try. Right. Great. Great. Thank you. 
Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing, sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at writingitpod And subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.