Politics/DC Data Reporter

The Data Journalism department seeks an experienced reporter with programming skills to contribute data-driven news coverage on the federal government and US politics, working in close collaboration with beat reporters on those topics.

As a data reporter, you’ll combine traditional reporting with data analysis to publish stories that shed light on major storylines. You’ll demonstrate a strong command of key datasets on your beat. You’ll have excellent data analysis skills, with the news judgment to match, and can design rigorous methodologies, bulletproofing your analyses and handling thorny data issues. 

Collaboration is at the heart of this role; you’ll work with a wide range of reporters and editors. You are eager to help others level-up their own skills — both in data literacy and data analysis — and excited about learning from others.

This is a hybrid position that includes regular office attendance in the New York or DC offices.

Important application requirement: Please submit a cover letter that highlights three relevant stories to which you made substantial contributions. For each story, please provide a link to the story and describe your contribution in one to three paragraphs. Aim to demonstrate a range of skills and variety of deadlines. Your cover letter should be no more than three pages long in total. In it, you are also welcome to provide a more traditional (but brief) description of your career and talents.

Responsibilities:

• Pitch and report data-driven stories that illuminate the day’s news events, explain difficult concepts and investigate wrongdoing

• Obtain and build datasets through FOIA, web scraping, document parsing and shoe-leather approaches 

• Develop an understanding of these datasets, enabling you to mine them for reporting leads, meaningful insights, and newsworthy findings.

• Be comfortable working on stories both independently and in diverse teams

• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world

• You will report to the Data Editor.

Basic Qualifications:

• 3+ years of relevant experience

• Experience finding, requesting, cleaning and analyzing complex datasets 

• Deep understanding of datasets relevant to US politics and the federal government

• Ability to communicate data findings powerfully, accurately, and succinctly

• Proficiency working with data in Python and/or R, spreadsheets, and relational databases

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with, and a preference for, working collaboratively on multidisciplinary teams

• Traditional reporting skills

• Experience reporting in response to major news cycles

• Comfort with command-line tooling, version control, and other important technical skills

This position is represented by the NewsGuild of NY.

REQ-018301