Bangor Daily News seeks a housing reporter

The Bangor Daily News is seeking a smart, hard-charging reporter to cover statewide housing and real estate in Maine.

You would join our policy team, which is dedicated to producing direct, honest, comprehensive and compelling local reporting that builds an audience across the state.

There’s no shortage of news on this new beat. Housing and homelessness are among the biggest issues facing the state. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of newcomers here, and the effect on the housing market has been staggering. Many in a new generation of homebuyers are effectively shut out of the market. Apartments are sparse from the state’s major cities to rural areas. Asylum seekers are coming to Maine’s largest city of Portland, but it has few resources to support their needs. Wealthy homebuyers are going to drastic lengths to secure property here. We are not building enough housing, and our population is aging dramatically, ensuring that we will be grappling with these problems for years.

You would join a team of knowledgeable and ambitious reporters who are dedicated to their craft and who help each other grow.

If you’re the right person for this challenge, this is how we would describe you:

• You are an aggressive self-starter with experience in covering news in a fast-paced environment.
• You have a track record of landing important scoops.
• You can balance daily coverage with a steady stream of enterprise stories in the pipeline.
• You have a watchdog mindset and are skilled enough to lay out problems and solutions.
• You know that good journalism depends on good sources, so you pride yourself on growing your network to get information that no one else has and talking often to regular people.
• You pound the pavement and want to own every story.

You’d be joining a large, and growing, statewide news organization in its fourth generation of local ownership. We believe that there’s a bright future for local newsrooms that invest in good journalism and put their audiences first. This role is a key part of that strategy.

If you think you might be our next great hire, please submit your resume, cover letter and links to at least three clips to jdyer@bangordailynews.com.

For more information click here.