MinnPost, one of the country’s leading nonprofit news organizations, is looking to hire a reporter – someone who can find great stories, especially in the mass of data that now surrounds us, and tell those stories using a mix of writing and visualization. We’re looking for someone with at least a couple years of experience who will produce a steady stream of data-driven pieces on a wide range of issues that are important to Minnesotans: from politics to the environment to urban planning.
We tend to give our reporters a great deal of freedom to explore areas where they think there might be a story worth telling. But we also ask a lot of them: You should have the ability to hit regular deadlines for data-centric pieces while balancing more than a few ambitious long-range projects.
Skills required
Though this job will be focused on using data, a phone is likely to be your most important tool. Requesting data from official sources will be a big part of the gig, and you should have experience filing FOIA requests. Beyond that, you should have interest and some ability in the tools of data analysis. You should know your way around a spreadsheet and have some familiarity with basic statistical concepts, even if you can’t perform a t-test without looking it up.
Those skills should be coupled with an interest in data visualization: selecting the best visual means to communicate sometimes complicated points to readers in a way that doesn’t require a lot of extra explanation. You should be familiar with the tools for presenting data on the web; some experience with mapping/GIS would be useful, and any experience working with databases would be a plus. More than specific technical skills, however, the most important thing is your ability to find and learn the right tool for the job you want to do, whether it’s a statistical method or a Javascript visualization library.
To apply
Send a resume, some samples of your work (URLs are fine) and a short note explaining your interest in the job to MinnPost Executive Editor Andrew Putz at aputz@minnpost.com. No phone calls, please.
