Caroline Southey is editor of The Conversation Africa, an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public. The Conversation Africa is supported by Knight Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the South African National Research Foundation. Here Southey writes about the launch of the site earlier this month. 

We went live with the first edition of The Conversation Africa on the morning of May 7. Nothing can fully describe the thrill of the 60 minutes before and the 60 minutes after we posted our first stories on the website.

The team gathered in our offices at 7 a.m. to watch the site go live. It was terrifying and exhilarating to see the real thing as The Conversation Africa appeared on the screen and we knew that the world could see us.

For 20 breathless minutes after our stories were posted we watched as metrics started to show up on our dashboard: a map of the world showed where our newsletter was being opened and read. We couldn’t believe our eyes; we were being read in Cape Town, Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Kampala, London, Melbourne and a host of other cities. The brilliant data capturing capability built by The Conversation Australia development team meant that we could also watch graph lines for individual stories as the statistics came in. All the lines were heading due north as the hits went from zero to 10 to 30 to 100 to 200. We whooped; we danced; we raised our fists in victory. And I wanted to cry, tears of relief and utter joy.

The numbers have been going up ever since. By the third day there were nearly 23,000 views of our 19 Africa-commissioned stories, more than 8, 300 subscribers to our daily newsletter, 768 likes on our Facebook page and nearly 500 Twitter followers. Our stories had been republished in local newspapers and on local websites. Our first lead story on migration had reached 8,371 views, 82 percent from republication.

We had created the fourth site of The Conversation, a website that publishes material written by academics and edited by journalists. It exists solely for the purpose of putting knowledge and information circulating in a relatively small academic pool into the public domain.

The beauty of the model is its simplicity. We combine basic journalistic skills – editing and having a nose for stories – with the deep pool of knowledge currently locked in the academy.

The site, the brainchild of former Melbourne Age editor Andrew Jaspan, was first launched in Australia four years ago followed by the United Kingdom and the United States. The three have achieved some remarkable milestones, publishing more than 27,000 articles from 21,000 academics with 2.5 million unique users a month and more than 22 million readers through republication on more than 16,000 media outlets.

The team for the Africa site is working from weather-worn premises with stunning panaromic views on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. With the support of donors, including  $100,000 in funding from Knight Foundation, Alexandra Storey, the general manager of The Conversation Africa, and I were able to hire six editors plus someone to head up strategic partnerships.

The Johannesburg operation will be followed by Nairobi and Lagos.

It is very early days for The Conversation Africa. We still have a very high mountain to climb to reach the peaks achieved by our sister newsrooms. Our goal is to produce trusted content that draws on the expertise of academics and researchers across Africa to inform public debate, explain complex problems and collaborate on developing solutions.

The site has a fresh feel because our newsroom behaves like a newsroom. We start the day at 9 a.m., discuss the events of the past 24 hours, what’s coming up in the next 48, think of story angles and then find academics to write for us.

The Conversation’s success comes from the fact that it hits two sweet spots: It provides a platform for academics to share their knowledge, and it fulfils a hunger for explanatory journalism that gives meaning to the world around us.

Will The Conversation Africa survive the first flush of excitement? I believe it will. We have put in place a strong management team, replicating The Conversation’s structures elsewhere. A third of our staff looks after the day-to-day management of our operation as well as cementing strategic partnerships to ensure our long-term sustainability. We have already been endorsed by 19 universities from across the continent.

Secondly, we are part of a strong network of existing sites with whom we share content and insights. The launch of the African site is part of a long-term goal to create a global newsroom. We look forward to welcoming the next kid on the block.

Visit The Conversation Africa online or follow on Twitter @TC_Africa.