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Digital Journalist - Worcester

Employment Type: Permanent
Ref: 1173 Date Posted: Thursday 13 Jan 2022

 

We are looking for a top-class digital-only reporter to help lead our online coverage.

Every day our online newsbrands reach hundreds of thousands of people, and you’ll be joining a team of driven, innovative journalists taking our content to the next level.

Our newsrooms produce the daily Worcester News and several weekly titles including the Stourbridge News, Kidderminster Shuttle, Malvern Gazette, Stroud News and Journal and the Wiltshire & Gloucestershire Standard.

This role presents an exciting opportunity for a digitally-savvy journalist to unearth the best breaking news, features, leisure and trending stories from across our patch.

You’ll be passionate about digital storytelling, with a desire to come up with new and innovative ways of telling those stories using a vast array of different skills, tools and platforms.

A big part of the job will also be immersing yourself in social media to help you tell your stories, develop relationships in your area and discover what it is that gets your community talking.

We want to tell the stories our communities care about – everything from what’s happening on the roads, the best new shops, restaurants and bars (and the ones to avoid!), as well as in-depth online coverage of the hottest news topics and trends.

 

Key responsibilities

  • Writing high quality, accurate news stories, live blogs and features to deadlines as agreed by news editors
  • Using a range of digital tools and platforms to tell stories, including video, audio, infographics and maps
  • Crafting and posting social media posts to sell your stories and drive engagement
  • Using social media to build contacts and sniff out the best stories from your community
  • Being first to report accurate breaking news from your patch to keep readers bang up to date
  • Thinking creatively to come up with new story ideas and ways to deliver them to our audience
  • Staying on top of the latest Google search trends (and trending UK-wide topics) and exploiting those opportunities on a local level relevant to our readership
  • Building our digital audience and social media following to bring our content to even more people in the community
  • Spotting national/regional content that could resonate in your patch and making it relevant and interesting to our readers
  • Using your SEO skills to reach the largest possible audience
  • With guidance from editors, using analytics to identify what our readers like and what they want next
  • Building contacts in the community and getting out and about on your patch to see what’s really going on
  • Joining forces with your counterparts across the UK to share ideas, best practice, success stories and skills 

Our ideal candidate will have:

  • NCTJ qualification (including 100wpm shorthand)
  • Excellent knowledge of relevant media law
  • The ability to write – and think – quickly under pressure
  • An adaptable style to produce everything from live blogs and listicles to long-reads and features
  • Skills with shooting and editing video as well as online tools and apps for producing images and audio
  • A keen news sense
  • Bags of ideas for how stories can be presented in the best possible way for our audiences
  • An understanding of what audiences want, and when
  • A good sense of humour
  • Knowledge of SEO and its importance to digital journalism
  • Excellent social media skills and the ability to spot stories and trending topics
  • Great people skills and the ability to get on with a wide range of people in the community
  • A high level of organisation and the ability to manage your own diary out on patch
  • Collaborative skills to pool ideas with the wider digital reporting team and take on board suggestions 

If this sounds like the job for you, email your CV to Regional Editor Stephanie Preece by close of play on Monday, January 31, 2022.