The Digital Producer and Reporter, News will identify local trending stories that resonate with our target audiences and execute WFYI & WBAA online and social media strategies. This role will collaborate closely with the digital team and larger newsroom to strategically highlight the high-impact journalism from our team of reporters on digital platforms.
This position also involves crafting compelling headlines, selecting impactful images, and ensuring our social media strategies effectively engage a broader and more diverse audience while implementing best SEO practices. The ideal candidate for this role is a digitally savvy person who thrives in a fast-paced environment, has a passion for storytelling, and a strong understanding of digital media. This individual will also understand how to best use strong visuals and has strong social media journalism experience.
This role also finds and quickly reports daily stories that answer the information needs for our primary local audiences – the Indianapolis metropolitan area and Tippecanoe County. What are local agencies, leaders and residents talking about each day on social media – Is it a quality-of-life story, a high-interest tragedy, or confusion about an emerging healthcare issue? This role learns what people want to know. Collaborating with the digital team to determine the optimal platforms for unique storytelling based on audience preferences will be essential in this role. Some stories may take the form of Instagram and TikTok builds/reels, while others may be published across all available digital platforms.
This is a mission-critical role for our station as WFYI sets goals to extend our policy equity reporting to larger, more diverse audiences.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
To be successful in this role, an individual must be able to perform in a satisfactory manner the essential functions and responsibilities listed below. We will make reasonable accommodations to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these functions.
Essential functions
- Manage WFYI/WBAA news social media accounts, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
- Follow digital journalism trends and identify new strategies we could employ to better serve our audiences.
- Ensure news stories are strategically featured on WFYI & WBBA sites and streaming platforms while implementing best SEO practices.
- Identify and follow local groups who are highly engaged in the communities that we serve to discover what our audience wants to know. Present those topics as story pitches to the daily news team and determine how best employ unique story telling opportunities and execute them.
- Collaborate with our marketing team to ensure news social media practices support and complement station goals.
- Provide weekend, night and holiday news coverage as needed.
EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE
To perform this job successfully, an individual must have the following education and/or experience unless otherwise noted below.
Required:
- Bachelor’s degree in communication, journalism, or equivalent experience.
- Experience with storytelling techniques on social media platforms.
- Demonstrated proficiency in AP Style, audio and video production, and photography and photo editing.
- Project management and production experience.
- Ability to excel in a collaborative team environment with a high level of personal motivation.
- Ability to work simultaneously on short and long-term projects.
Preferred:
- Experience with computer-assisted reporting.
- Experience in data analysis methods.
- Previous work in both broadcast and digital news reporting.
- Familiarity with community engagement journalism.
- Previous work in collaborations
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