Data Reporter/ Developer

Summary:

You’ll join a team dedicated to rigorous, data-driven enterprise journalism at The Philadelphia Inquirer. On your own and working collaboratively with others, you’ll produce ambitious journalism that proves its claims and tells new stories in new ways. In addition to reporting and writing stories, you’ll conceive and execute new ways of telling them online.

What You’ll Do

You’ll join an interdisciplinary team at the Inquirer, built to produce enterprise journalism anchored by data. The three-member team is responsible for generating stories that use computational methods to illuminate the world around us and contextualize the news.

We are looking for a hybrid reporter and developer with an interest in the start-to-finish production of ambitious, data-driven journalism that proves its claims. That means you’ll help discover stories, analyze data, report stories, create data visualizations, and produce the stories. Because we’ll work constantly with reporters and editors from across the newsroom, you’ll need a demonstrated desire to collaborate.

This position will focus on three primary objectives:

• Developing rigorous, data-driven enterprise journalism, with a strong focus on municipal accountability, understanding the electorate and evaluating government policy and effectiveness. 
• Creating service-oriented data tools and products that enable Inquirer readers to explore public data and better understand and navigate public policy.
• Building internal databases (e.g. campaign finance, property records, court records) and tooling that enable reporters to authoritatively and efficiently add depth and context to daily stories and quick-turn enterprise.

We’re looking for someone familiar with data, with a front-end web development background (including design, development, and deployment), general back-end knowledge, and experience with a programming language such as R or Python. But you won’t have to do everything on your own. You’ll have support from a team of designers, news developers and product engineers. 

Don’t think you need to have every skill listed. Programming and data are constantly changing, so we value creativity, open-mindedness, critical thinking, and a willingness to learn over expertise in any specific technology. We’re interested in what you’ll be able to do, not just what you currently know or have previously done.

What We’re Looking For

• Ability to generate creative story ideas
• Portfolio of data-visualization projects (not necessarily in news publications; corporate work, student projects, and others also qualify) 
• Working knowledge of front-end web development (HTML, CSS, JS)
• Ability to use d3.js or similar JavaScript libraries to produce dynamic, interactive data visualizations
• Ability to clean and analyze data, including programmatically (using R, Python, etc.)
• Knowledge of how data presentation can illuminate or obfuscate understanding
• Passion for rigorous journalism that proves its facts
• Attention to detail and excellent written and oral communication skills
• Ability to meet deadlines and adapt in a daily, unpredictable news environment
• Ability to learn new tools and skills quickly

Helpful skills

• Familiarity with cartography and general GIS skills
• Demonstrated ability to break out of traditional story formats
• Ability to programmatically extract structured data from unstructured documents
• Working knowledge of scripting languages (and related web frameworks)