An upstart Web site called Inside Higher Ed occupied a table at the recent Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, sharing the floor with venerable academic publishers such as Oxford University Press and Yale University Press.

Three colleagues from the Chronicle of Higher Education, with a combined 55 years at the publication – Scott Jaschik, Doug Lederman, and Kathlene Collins – left in 2003 and later joined together to found Inside Higher Ed. It is already an online source of news and commentary for academics, and there’s more to come.

“We want to be the place where people come for the conversation in higher education across boundaries, disciplines, and university hierarchy,” Mr. Jaschik told the Knickerbocker. While the site currently features original news content and an “Around the Web” feature, blogs, discussion areas, and other resources are set to follow. Mr. Jaschik said the site was in its “supersoft launch” and Mr. Lederman cautioned that it represents but “a small fraction of what we’re going to do.”

Surprisingly, some areas of the site have an informal tone and offer party reports from events such as Modern Language Association receptions (including which offered free drinks). Editors have also gathered chatty public relations advice for a certain Harvard president regarding recent remarks he made on women.

Mr. Jaschik said that not all coverage of serious topics should take itself so seriously. All three used the word “democratize” in describing their site.

“I am the Chronicle’s biggest fan,” said Ms. Collins, who feels that the Internet has changed recruiting. “I had a bunch of ideas for what would make a really ideal recruiting Web site for higher education. It wasn’t going to happen at Chronicle and so I decided I was going to leave and make it happen somewhere else.” Scheduled to launch in a month or so, the career portion of the site will store a candidate’s curriculum vitae, writing samples, and confidential letters and allow the search committee to be given access and enter comments – all paperless. “Nobody has to take that application and copy it seven times,” Ms. Collins said. It will speed up the process, she said, since once letters of recommendation are in the database, students won’t be dependent on faculty or institutions to send them out repeatedly. “In my mind, this is the way of the future,” she said.

Mr. Lederman added, “Colleges got wired early. They increasingly want their information delivered electronically.”

He also noted that the site is free. “It’s an increasingly jumbled and competitive market. People in markets like that need good information. We think you shouldn’t have to have deep pockets to get that information.”

Ms. Collins said she was heartened by the fact that, on three different occasions, graduate students at the MLA conference told her, “Wait a minute,” only to return with friends” saying, “They need to hear this, too.”

Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro.com, an online community and job board for journalists, said its success would likely hinge on how entrenched and active its competitors are. She said building traffic is “a two-prong battle”: One not only has to list jobs but also draw applicants to the site, she said. She said the Chronicle appeared to have a “pretty full-fledged job site,” but said one way a competitor might gain a foothold is to create offline events that bring people together.

The editor in chief of the Chronicle, Philip Semas, said, “We feel that we’re fulfilling the news and information needs of people in higher education and providing them with a first-rate job service.” Its site receives 10 million hits a month.

“We’re going to put together a community of professionals, that creates an audience for these recruitment messages,” said Ms. Collins. “We are charmed by this idea of organic development of a community of professionals; that really resonates for us. We see ourselves as good facilitators of that process.”

They hope to take a bite out of a market that consists of approximately 2.1 million professionals in higher education, with 1.4 million faculty members and 700,000 administrators.

Inside Higher Ed has just hired Scott McLemee, who is leaving the Chronicle and will write a column called “Intellectual Affairs.”

Ms. Collins said the small size of their operation offers its own advantages. It is a free site (the Chronicle’s site has both paid and free sections), and can “turn on a dime” with enormous flexibility. “We are resonating something that’s happening more broadly in the Internet,” she said, “We are not producing something and delivering it and you should thank us very much,” but rather “we are collaborating with you to deliver the thing that you need, and we are looking for feedback every step of the way.”

Is it a case of David and Goliath? Ms. Collins said the parallel in some ways did not fit. “I don’t perceive it as a direct challenge. It springs from our sense that the Chronicle serves some very specific purposes in this market and they do it very well. But there are needs and constituents that are not being met.”

But as Mr. Jaschik describes his target audience, it appears to broadly overlap with the Chronicle’s: “We want everyone in higher education to read us. We want to be as relevant to the graduate student finishing her dissertation as to the vice president for finance. We want to be as relevant to the person teaching in distance education, as to the person working in an ivy-covered building.”

Mr. Lederman said most higher-education press at the national level remains consumer-oriented, geared toward parents, for example. Likewise, Mr. Jaschik said that there is room for improvement in the scope of coverage. “You wouldn’t know reading the national press that far more students attend community colleges than private colleges,” he said.

Right now, the trio work mostly from home, but sometimes meet at a local Cosi sandwich shop in Washington, D.C. “That’s our conference room,” Ms. Collins said.

At the MLA, they gave out “Inside Higher Ed” promotional magnets with movable words such as “Derrida” and “Ph.D.” Mr. Jaschik said, that he “went wild” and collected words. But, he said, Ms. Collins “yelled at me because I didn’t give her verbs.” Ms. Collins told the Knickerbocker, “I don’t often get to edit Scott.”