Andrew Jaspan

Jaspan is the Asia-Pacific Director of Innovation Media International, on the Board of the RMIT Global Cities Research Institute, a speaker and participant in the Australian Davos conference, and was an observer in the 2020 Ideas Summit.

In April 2017, Jaspan began work on developing The Global Academy, based at RMIT University with the support of Melbourne, Deakin, Western Sydney and RMIT universities.

Since April 2017, Jaspan has been establishing new media platform The Global Academy, a partnership between universities of Deakin, Melbourne, RMIT and Western Sydney.

In 2008, Jaspan started working with the higher education sector on The Conversation project. The website is based upon the idea of sharing the expertise of academia directly with the public and thus turning the university sector into a giant newsroom. Content is written by academics working in collaboration with professional editors using a custom built collaborative publishing platform. The Conversation launched in early 2011. The project launched with the ambition to transform the research and analysis of leading universities and research bodies into a journalistic product that was freely accessible to the public. Through The Conversation, Jaspan pioneered new digital information channels for academic knowledge under a Creative Commons licence; new collaborative frameworks for academic institutions globally and created new non-advertising funding models for news delivery.

Jaspan joined The Age as Editor-in-Chief in October 2004. Between 2004 and 2008, Jaspan was the Editor-in-Chief of Melbourne's The Age and The Sunday Age. Throughout his appointment as Editor in Chief at The Age, circulation, readership and online figures increased. In August 2008, Jaspan left his position as part of a major restructuring of Fairfax that included 550 job losses across its Australian operations. Jaspan was replaced as Editor in Chief by Paul Ramadge in September 2008.

Jaspan edited The Observer in London, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, and Sunday Herald in the UK. In 1988 he launched the Sunday Times Scotland Edition which covered Scottish news, sport, business, commentary and arts/culture. In February 1989 he was announced as the editor of the Scotland on Sunday' The paper had launched six months earlier and Jaspan relaunched it as a quality newspaper which went on to establish a reputation for investigative and campaigning journalism. In 1993 he was appointed Editor of The Scotsman but six months later was appointed, by The Guardian Newspapers as Editor of The Observer. He was then appointed in 1996 as Editor in Chief and Publisher of The Big Issue UK. In 1998 he joined Scottish Media Group in Glasgow to prepare the business case for the launch of a new paper in 1999, The Sunday Herald. Under his editorship the paper won numerous awards including Scottish Newspaper of the Year and UK Sunday newspaper of the Year. The paper closed in 2018.

Andrew Jaspan, (born 20 April 1952) is a British-Australian journalist, the Creator and Founder of The Conversation, an independent not-for-profit website of analysis and news from the university and research sector  and its Editor-in-Chief from The Conversation's launch in March 2011 until March 2017. The Conversation was established in response to what Jaspan describes as “increasing market failure in delivering trusted content.” Jaspan resigned from The Conversation in March 2017.