Engagement Reporter

ProPublica • New York, NY

4d • $85,000 - $120,000 • Remote

About The Position

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
We’re looking for an engagement reporter to join our unique, award-winning engagement reporting team.
Engagement reporters do ProPublica’s signature crowdsourced investigations, using everything from callouts and tip lines to citizen-fueled science. As an engagement reporter, you’ll team up with colleagues across the country to gather evidence and receipts for hard-hitting, community-driven stories. You may also work with external partners on long- and short-term projects through our Local Reporting Network. You’ll find and reach people who have important stories to tell, figure out how to include them in the reporting process and work on journalism that could help improve their lives. You’ll likely come across more stories and new leads in the process.
Like everyone in our newsroom, our team focuses on accountability journalism and measures success by impact. We’ve worked with communities to tell thousands of people’s stories, including educators, parents, mental health providers, wildfire survivors, migrant dairy farm workers, vulnerable workers and residents living near toxic hot spots. We’ve filled information gaps with calculators, guides and letter generators. And we’ve done our best to reach people in the spaces where they gather, both online and off. This journalism has led to impact big and small, from equipping patients with better information to a promised $2 billion to fix Idaho public school buildings.

Requirements

• You have at least three3 years of journalism experience, either in reporting or an engagement-focused role. Most successful engagement reporters come from backgrounds in newsrooms, but we are open to people with skill sets from different industries.
• You’ve worked on stories that shed light on injustices and hold the powerful accountable. You don’t need to have done monthslong investigations, but you do need experience reporting.
• You’ve got a track record of creative outreach. Perhaps you’ve run a Facebook group, optimized headlines for search, built a newsletter list or user-tested an app. Maybe you’ve produced events, A/B tested mass mailers, canvassed neighborhoods or set up a listening post. Online or off, you had a strategy and you adapted it along the way.
• You’re an active, excellent listener and a thoughtful writer who can match your style to the occasion. You understand the difference between messaging the moderator of a Facebook group and emailing a PR person for comment.
• You’ve got a strong news sense, a keen eye forattention to detail and the ability to connect the dots in investigations.
• You’ve got the ability to work independently and with teammates on collaborative projects. You like working with others, but you’re also proactive about finding opportunities and pushing projects forward on your own.
• You have the patience and organizational acumen for long-term projects. You probably have opinions about spreadsheets.

Responsibilities

• Identify promising crowdsourcing opportunities and team up with other reporters to do investigative stories that rely on community outreach and engagement.
• Craft and manage callouts, surveys and other crowdsourcing tools for investigations. Help keep track of ProPublica’s extensive network of respondents to our previous callouts, and help reporters reengage relevant groups as reporting lines arise.
• Research communities and get to know people who live and work in the places we’re covering. Strategize methods to engage sources clearly, effectively and compassionately.
• Listen for, pitch and take the lead on service journalism opportunities, such as tools and guides.
• Review, flag and sometimes follow up on promising tips that come in through ProPublica’s newsroom tip lines. Identify themes and promising angles.
• Develop relationships with long-term community sources, such as union stewards, members of the clergy, Reddit moderators, petition managers and other local leaders.
• Collaborate with national, local and specialty reporting teams across ProPublica and in our many partner newsrooms, including through our Local Reporting Network.
• Brainstorm the biggest ideas you can imagine with a team of the most creative engagement journalists in the country.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees