We are not currently accepting applications for this position.

ProPublica is looking for two engagement reporters to join our award-winning 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 the evidence and receipts to tell impactful, community-driven stories. You’ll find and reach people who have important stories to tell, figure out how to include them in the reporting process and think about the potential for positive impact in their lives. You’ll likely come across more stories and new leads in the process.

We’ve used engagement reporting to hold companies, schools, private-equity-owned doctors groups, politicians and a fundamentally flawed maternal care culture accountable. It’s exciting work, and we plan to do a whole lot more of it.

What You’ll Do Here:

• Identify promising crowdsourcing opportunities and team up with other reporters in the newsroom to do investigative stories that rely on community outreach and engagement.
• Craft and manage callouts, surveys and other crowdsourcing tools for investigations.
• Research communities and get to know people who live and work in the places we’re covering. Strategize ways to engage sources clearly, effectively and compassionately. This often involves doing service journalism to fill the community’s information needs.
• Flag and occasionally follow up on promising tips that come in through ProPublica’s newsroom tip lines.
• Keep track of ProPublica’s extensive network of respondents to our previous callouts, and help reporters re-engage relevant groups as reporting lines arise.
• Develop relationships with long-term community sources, such as union stewards, clergymen, Reddit moderators, petition managers and other community leaders.
• Brainstorm the biggest ideas you can imagine with a team of the most creative engagement journalists in the country.

You’ll work with reporting teams across our organization and in our many partner newsrooms. We are especially eager to connect with undercovered communities in the South, Southwest and Midwest.

You can work out of our offices in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix or Berkeley, California, and we’re also open to strong remote candidates. The positions are full time with benefits.

You Should Apply If:

• You have experience doing stories that shed light on injustices and hold the powerful accountable. You don’t need to have done months-long 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 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 practice active listening.
• You have the patience and organizational acumen for long-term projects. You’ve got the ability to work independently and with teammates on collaborative projects.
• You’re committed to being a decent human being.

We know there may be great candidates reading this who may not fit into what we’ve described, or who have alternative skills — for example, rural community organizers or subreddit mods or town hall note takers — who could bring a lot to this position. There also may be candidates who psych themselves out of applying even if they would be great at this job. If any of that describes you, please don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

What You Should Send Us:

Work examples are the most important part of this application.

The application form will require you to send us three projects from your portfolio, and it will give you the space to walk us through your own contributions to those clips. Take advantage of this to tell us everything you did, from behind-the-scenes wins you’re proud of to how you helped your colleagues. Let us know how your engagement and outreach work shaped the output. Don’t be shy — tell us what succeeded (numbers and evidence of impact are welcome) and how you’d do it differently next time.

Make sure to read the section above, titled “You should apply if,” because it’s also our evaluation criteria for the position. Use your projects and the rest of your application to show us that you’ve got the skills we’ve listed, or why the skills you have are the ones we actually need.

We are dedicated to improving our newsroom, in part by better reflecting the people we cover. We are committed to diversity and building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and ages. We especially encourage members of underrepresented communities to apply, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities. (Here is a breakdown of our staff.)

The deadline for applications is Thursday, Nov. 18, at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

Apply using this form.

Got questions? Email [email protected] or [email protected]. No phone calls, please.

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