UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State's Office of Strategic Communications will host the top editor from the academic media website The Conversation (theconversation.com) for a virtual brown-bag webinar from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 2, to give a presentation for faculty researchers about communicating research to the public.
Maria Balinska will talk about why it’s important to bring academics into popular media, what’s in it for you as an academic, pitching your research to media, finding your “news peg,” and more. Penn State faculty can register for the webinar here.
Before joining The Conversation, Balinska worked at the BBC in London where, for 10 years, she was editor, World Current Affairs Radio. A 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she is also the founder of Latitude News, a digital platform that introduced new ways of covering world affairs for American audiences.
The Conversation US is an independent, nonprofit source of news and views written by the academic and research community, delivered directly to the public. Penn State academics who write for The Conversation receive their own faculty biography page on the website, access to a staff of professional editors and access to readership analytics for their articles. Past articles written by Penn State faculty are archived on the University’s Conversation landing page.
Since partnering with The Conversation, Penn State researchers have written more than 190 articles that have garnered 12.9 million readers. The site has a Creative Commons license, so other news organizations often republish the articles. Penn State faculty have had Conversation articles republished on national media websites, such as the Washington Post, Business Insider and Newsweek. The Conversation has international website editions in Africa, Australia, France and the United Kingdom.