The Marshall Project is establishing a news team in St. Louis, Missouri, to provide depth and resources to criminal justice coverage in the city, as well as the state. Our St. Louis-based team will produce in-depth and investigative content on criminal justice, covering the St. Louis area, statewide issues, and some matters with national implications. This news team will form a vital part of The Marshall Project’s local expansion, which also includes Cleveland, Ohio, and Jackson, Mississippi.

One of the guiding principles of our local news initiative is to share and distribute our work among existing local media partners. The Local Partnerships Coordinator will initiate local and statewide collaborations across print, digital, radio and television outlets, and also create opportunities for Investigate This!, our reporting toolkits for local media. Where opportunities arise, they could also work with media in neighboring states, or look for national placement opportunities for some stories.

The right candidate for this position might be someone with a communications background who is an expert in placing stories, or who can deploy engagement techniques to better understand different audiences and their needs, or someone who has experience in local television or radio production, and understands how to localize our stories for that market.

The successful candidate will be tasked with seeking innovative distribution strategies at the local level, and creating relationships with editors who want to deepen criminal justice reporting among their own teams. You will experiment with how different forms of storytelling can connect our work with a diverse network of local partners and audiences.

You will be a motivated self-starter who is organized and creative, adept at forging relationships with local journalists and communicating our work to them. You will share our original reporting with media partners, create ongoing and deep relationships with other newsrooms, host listening sessions to answer questions about our work, track the impact of our local work, and share those findings both locally and internally.

Essential duties and responsibilities:

• Coordinate the distribution of our work across a network of local outlets in St. Louis and throughout Missouri, creating new partnerships with print, digital, radio and television.
• Maintain a local story database and tracking system so we can see where our work has led to local reporting, as well as the impact of those stories.
• Conduct user research to improve functionality and new feature development.
• In partnership with our engagement team, host story-focused information sessions for local reporters. These will primarily be online, but in-person events could also be produced on a case-by-case basis.
• Develop stories based off our original reporting (both local and national) for MO-based digital, print, television and radio partners.
• Help with the production and sharing of all stories that come out of the St. Louis and other local newsrooms, time permitting.
• Work with our visual team to provide art and photographs to our publishing partners.
• Create shareable social assets for our partners, using Marshall Project templates from the Audience team, to help with the promotion and outreach for the work.

You’ll also:

• Work closely with our partnership team to deepen and broaden our media relationships in all of our local news teams, developing replicable strategies across newsrooms.
• Manage a local reporting network database, ensuring that stakeholders are sharing information about the projects selected for this initiative.
• Strategize with our Investigate This! and partnership team on how our work can be localized and shared.
• Maintain internal documentation and training materials in our CMS.
• Collaborate with our development team in their fundraising efforts for local, which might include helping with grant proposals and reporting.

What we’re looking for:

• Experience working in a newsroom as a partnership or production associate, coupled with the ability to envision how stories can be told across different mediums.
• Experience managing or producing editorial projects, especially those involving multiple media partners.
• Familiarity with Trello, and/or experience working in a CMS such as Wordpress.
• Someone who is not afraid to pick up the phone, or set up Zoom meetings, and constantly create outreach opportunities and new relationships with potential partners.

We do not expect every candidate to be equally skilled in all these areas, and this is not a complete list of all relevant qualifications applicants might bring to the job. Please tell us about your other assets not mentioned here that may be valuable to this role. Reaching talent across a range of backgrounds and experiences is deeply important to us. If you do not have the exact combination of skills listed here, but are still interested in this role and/or in The Marshall Project, we'd love to hear from you.

The position is in bargaining unit represented by the News Guild of NY.

Who you’ll be working with:

Ruth Baldwin, our Editorial Director and your manager

Michelle Billman, our Partnership and Engagement Associate, who oversees Investigate This!

Marlon A. Walker, our Managing Editor for Local

Terri Troncale, our Partnership Manager

Nicole Lewis, our Engagement Editor

Ebony Reed, our Chief Strategy Officer

…As well as the rest of the local team in St. Louis, who we are in the process of hiring.

The successful candidate should be located in Missouri, ideally in a major media market such as Kansas City, St. Louis or Columbia.

Who we are:

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system. In 2016 and 2021, The Marshall Project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. We have also been honored with the Goldsmith Prize, multiple National Magazine Awards, and for General Excellence from the Online Journalism Awards. We are not advocates — we follow the facts, and do not pander to any audience — but we have a declared mission: to create and sustain a sense of urgency about the criminal justice system. We do not generally cover breaking news, although we curate the reporting of other news outlets in our morning newsletter. Our work includes investigative and explanatory projects and shorter pieces aimed at highlighting stories that other news organizations miss, underestimate or misunderstand. To ensure our work reaches a larger audience, we often partner with other media outlets; we have co-published with more than hundreds of newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and online sites.

We are an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity. We welcome qualified applicants of all races, ethnicities, physical abilities, genders and sexual orientations, including people who have been incarcerated or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

This job is full-time, with a competitive salary and benefits, including:

Annual Salary Range: $75,000 - $90,000

100% employer-paid and employer-contributed medical, vision and dental insurance options, matching traditional and Roth 401k (immediate vesting), and 20 weeks of paid parental leave.

Voluntary benefits include: Health and Dependent Care FSA, commuter benefits, pet insurance, short and long-term disability insurance, employee and dependent life insurance, AFLAC accident, hospital indemnity and critical illness coverage, legal benefits, personal excess liability insurance, and employee discount marketplace.

Employees receive 15 days of paid time off, plus two personal days. The Marshall Project office is closed between Dec. 24 and Jan 2.

How to apply:

To apply, use this form to submit your resume and short answers to these four prompt questions.

We ask you to answer these questions instead of submitting a cover letter. Added together, your answers should not exceed about 1,200 words — a little longer than a typical cover letter. Links and basic formatting can be copy-pasted.

• Briefly describe your experience managing editorial projects and/or partnerships. Please let us know about a few examples that you think were especially successful.
• Please tell us about a few stories, projects or organizations that inspire you or that you aspire to emulate. We are especially interested in examples from local journalism projects.
• Examples of your work. Can you provide us with several examples of your best work. Write a few sentences about the role that you played in each project, highlighting how partnership and collaboration helped to contribute to the project’s success.
• Can you give one example of a challenge facing the Missouri media landscape that you hope this role will help address.

The deadline to submit an application is 11:59 p.m. Eastern on October 21, 2024.

Please know it usually takes us up to a month to review applications, but we are committed to communicating with candidates at every stage of our process.

Candidate office hours:

In order to help candidates prepare a complete and comprehensive application, we are making our team available for office hours several times during this hiring period. Please bring all questions to one of the following anonymous webinars.

In order to create a consistent and equitable experience, we encourage all candidates with specific questions about the role or the application process to register for a webinar and attend in order to ask your question.

Webinar dates, times and registration links:

Register for either session below (each session will be hosted by our hiring editors and our director of careers and culture).

Tuesday October 15, 2024 from 3 PM - 4 PM ET · Register

Wednesday October 18, 2024 from 1 PM - 2 PM ET · Register