Audience Engagement Editor

The Hechinger Report is seeking an Audience Engagement Editor to help us both build engagement with and grow our audience.

The Audience Engagement Editor will join a high-powered team of writers and editors, known for producing top quality education journalism and placing Hechinger stories with partner news outlets across the country. We are not a breaking-news organization; our aim is to provide deeply reported and insightful coverage of crucial issues faced by students and schools, at all education levels from early childhood to colleges and universities.

We are a collaborative newsroom distributed across the country, so the Audience Engagement Editor will need to be able to communicate well remotely with writers and editors and understand the nuances of their stories. This person will be a strong writer of promotional text for social media and newsletters, with an ability to pinpoint the heart of a subject and an aversion to jargon. The candidate should have experience with leading social media and newsletter tools, and an ability to draw insights from data analytics that can help us better understand our audience and expand it. Hechinger has its own established best practices for cultivating new audiences, but the Audience Engagement Editor will be expected to enhance those practices and develop new ones, as well as new products, if needed.

The overall goal will be to expand the impact of our journalism. This position will report to the Executive Editor and confer often with the Development Director, both based in New York.

A strong candidate will have experience using analytics and surveys; experience writing and updating copy for social media postings; knowledge of best practices with newsletters and with audience engagement strategies that are particular to individual stories, as well as those that help the entire website.

We have our offices in New York City. This position can be remote and can be based outside our headquarters.

The salary for this position is $70,000/year. The Hechinger Report is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and this position includes the College’s comprehensive full-time benefits package, described here.  Hechinger also is committed to providing professional development opportunities to its staff.

We’re sure that not all candidates will match exactly what we’ve written below. The Hechinger Report understands that good colleagues can come from all kinds of backgrounds. If you have skills and experiences that you think would allow you to thrive in this role, apply and tell us what you will bring to the newsroom.

Requirements and application instructions.