After graduating, Jaspan launched
The New Manchester Review magazine which focussed on news, investigations and arts and culture. To help fund the magazine, Jaspan ran Monday night concerts at the Band on the Wall pub between 1977–9, showcasing
punk bands (including
Joy Division,
The Buzzcocks, and
The Fall) as well as poets (including
John Cooper Clark and
Adrian Henri). A year later, he moved instead to be editor of
Scotland on Sunday, relaunching it as a quality newspaper which went on to establish a reputation for investigative and campaigning journalism.
In 1996 he was appointed publisher of The Big Issue'', the street paper sold by
homeless people. The Founder,
John Bird, asked Jaspan to improve the quality and mainstream credibility of the magazine. 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. In 2004, Jaspan was appointed editor-in-chief of
The Age and
The Sunday Age. 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.
The Conversation Jaspan first discussed the concept of
The Conversation in 2009 with
Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor at the
University of Melbourne. Jaspan wrote a report for Davis on the university's engagement with the public, envisioning the university as "a giant newsroom", with academics and researchers collaboratively providing expert, informed content that engaged with the news cycle and major current affairs issues. This vision became the blueprint for
The Conversation. The model he developed is highly unusual for a news site: content is written by academics working in collaboration with professional editors, published
open access under a
Creative Commons licence, and is funded by collaborative frameworks for academic institutions The concept was as a response to what Jaspan described at the time as "increasing market failure in delivering trusted content" and declining editorial diversity in Australia. The website launched in Australia in early 2011 after three years of development. Jaspan took The Conversation to the UK where he raised the launch funds and established a base at City University London with the support of the VC, Sir Paul Curran, and Jonathan Hyams. It launched in 2013. He then took the concept to the US where Thomas Fiedler, then dean of the School of Communications at Boston University, offered to host
The Conversation U.S. and provide space for the first newsroom. With a university base established, Jaspan was able to raise the $2.3m launch funding and launched in 2014, initially led by Jaspan as U.S. CEO, Margaret Drain as editor, and Bruce Wilson leading development and university relations. For the U.S. pilot Jaspan secured support from the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four other foundations. Jaspan then helped set up the other sites in Africa and France in 2015, Canada in 2017, Indonesia in 2017, and Spain in 2018.
360info Jaspan left
The Conversation in April 2018, with professional friction cited as a contributing factor, to work on establishing a new media platform called ''
360info''. The project was initially a partnership between universities of Deakin, Melbourne, RMIT and Western Sydney. From 2017-2020 he was based in
RMIT's School of Media and Communication, then moved to
Monash University, which became the host university for the project. In November 2021 it launched as
360info. Instead of a focus on breaking news,
360info reports on the worlds' most pressing challenges and offers research-driven solutions. 360info provides newsrooms with free access to all its content under Creative Commons. In that way replenishing the content ecosystem with high-grade specialist content - and to help displace a reliance on the increasingly poor and shallow that is widely available. By the end of 2025 it has published over 3000 articles from 190 universities worldwide and is distributed by over 1,800 newsrooms and publishers. It has editors working in Delhi, Jakarta, Milan, Athens and Melbourne.
Publication The British Journalism Review published in December 2025 an article by Jaspan on the thinking behind the launch of The Conversation and 360info. == Awards and recognition ==