Ten years ago, The Conversation UK launched its first podcast to help bring academics’ research to a wider audience. Now, the publisher is a multi-award-winning podcasting powerhouse. Head of Audio Gemma Ware outlines what they’ve learned from a decade in audio.
The Conversation is a charitable membership organization funded by universities, foundations and research bodies. It has 10 editions which operate in 14 countries, and publish content under a Creative Commons license. The main aim is to be a bridge between academics and the general public, with journalists helping to communicate complex ideas and research to non-specialists.
The UK edition launched in 2013, and Gemma Ware joined soon after as Education Editor, covering the UK and worldwide education system. As a fan of podcasts like Serial and That American Life, Ware and fellow editor Annabel Bligh spotted an opportunity to introduce podcasts to The Conversation UK: “These ideas that we’re dealing with every day in the written word that we’re editing, we think that they can be explored even further in audio,” Ware tells us on The Publisher Podcast from MediaVoices.
Articles on The Conversation are usually written alongside one to three academics, and can be based on something in the news, or their research, or a topic they know well. This is a format that has alyways had a strong potential to translate to audio and, by 2016, The Conversation UK was ready to launch its first podcast.
Figuring out the right format
The Conversation UK’s first show was called The Anthill, a monthly podcast compiling three thematically-linked stories. This would feature a number of academics, knitting together topics such as pain, memory and humour across different segments.
But Ware found it challenging to produce the podcast her full-time editorial job: “Monthly is quite a difficult periodicity for podcasts. You feel like you have a lot of time, but if it’s not your full-time job, or you haven’t got a dedicated person doing it, it’s actually really hard.”
A monthly cadence can also be more challenging to build an audience for. In some ways, it’s not frequent enough to build a listening habit, but enough to create a non-trivial additional workload.
In 2019, the publisher decided to shift to a series-based approach:“You can get a lot more traction for series. You can do more in-depth work leading up to it, and build a series of content in the written form around them, and really push it over a series of weeks.”
She also found there were more opportunities to get funding when a series was going deep into specific topics, rather than just a single episode.
Learnings from series
The Conversation UK’s first series was called To the moon and beyond, a five-part podcast marking 50 years since the first moon landing, and looking ahead to the next 50 years. The series featured world academic experts, including space scientists, historians, lawyers, and a former astronaut. “We used that as a learning experience to then go and do other series. When we really got the model working was when we did this series called the Expert guide to conspiracy theories.”
That was supported by a grant from a EU-funded network of academics which had been doing many years of work on conspiracy theories across Europe. The timing of the launch was fortuitous, with the first episode going live in March 2020 – just days before Covid lockdowns began in the UK and around the world.
Ware noted that the timing helped propel the success of the series. But, crucially, it it still stands up as a series six years later, with the team having taken an evergreen approach to the discussions, from psychologists exploring why some people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories, to anthropologists outlining why theories are more common in some parts of the world, and a history of their evolution.
Ware explained that it is important for podcast topics to have a long shelf life. She described The Conversation as “a marriage between journalism and academia,” with the subject matter tied closely tied to academic research.
As an example, Scam Factories, a series exploring the inner workings of Southeast Asia’s brutal scam compounds, came about when a colleague read about the compounds on the news. They then found a group of researchers who were writing a book on the same topic.
Other series, like Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, released last autumn to mark 250 years since the author’s birth, are built around key events or anniversaries: “We had lots of content that we were doing already [on Jane Austen], and our arts desk came with this really great pitch and said, ‘We think we want to make our first Arts series, can we try?’”
As well as the series, The Conversation UK still has a regular podcast. This went weekly in 2021 and rebranded from The Anthill to The Conversation Weekly, with Ware becoming Head of Audio. The format has also evolved from its initial multi-topic episodes to just one theme: “We’ve learned it’s best to stick to one story. We used to have these second stories… 10 minutes at the end of each episode, and they were very research-driven. But it’s quite difficult if you’re not really a magazine show… if you tack on a magazine element to the end, people don’t really understand what that is. We were getting big drop-offs after the first story in the way people were listening.”
Last year, the show shifted format again, coming closer to the news agenda than previously. Each episode is now trying to answer the question ‘how did we get here?’ “But we’re doing that through an academic lens, so we want an academic to help us explain an element of history or a scientific breakthrough, about why we’ve got to the moment that we’re in right now.”
The weekly podcast feed also provides a way to sample new series and drive audiences to their other feed, The Conversation Documentaries. This means that, rather than starting from scratch building listenership each time, they already have a dedicated base of followers each time a new series drops.
Experimenting in video
The Conversation UK has only tried one video podcast so far. Strange Health, launched in early 2026, aims to decode wellness trends. “We very much conceived of that as a video podcast,” said Ware, emphasising that they didn’t want to add video onto podcasts for the sake of it. The team knew that Health Editor Katie Edwards and practicing GP and lecturer Dan Baumgardt would be good on-camera hosts. But it was also an opportunity to meet younger audiences where they’re seeking health content: YouTube.
Despite Strange Health’s success and some practical learnings from doing a video-first podcast, Ware said she has no early plans to add video into their current roster of shows: “We don’t have a studio, and that’s one of the challenges we have, particularly when we interview academics all over the world. We can’t necessarily bring them to studios, and we don’t have the budget…to get someone to go and film them. Even our weekly show, we could probably make bits of it into a video podcast, but it would be quite a different beast.”
For The Conversation UK, audio has proved to be a valuable way of sharing its work in different formats, and adding value to its university members. It has iterated towards a model that allows academic voices to be heard, while also bringing in crucial perspectives or explanations for a non-expert audience through narration.
“We want to get academic research that’s locked away and which people don’t understand the nuances of, out to the general public,” said Gemma Ware, emphasising the mission of democratising knowledge. “A documentary [podcast], where you have a narrator or a journalist who’s interviewing an academic is one of the best ways of doing that.”
Listen to the full episode above, or search The Publisher Podcast from MediaVoices wherever you listen to podcasts.
