Bloomberg is looking for a reporter for Game Plan, a new and growing section of Bloomberg Business dedicated to everything ambitious young people need to get ahead.
The section showcases deeply-sourced and obsessive reporting on the world of higher education, smart and useful news about how to launch and advance your career, and the assorted other stuff striving millennials are thinking about.
Specifically, that means we’re obsessed with what’s stressing young people out, both while they’re in college — whether it’s an ill-advised student debt protest or their textbook budget — and after (the generation gap with real estate agents who want their business, what’s changing about applying to law school, why they can’t sleep, whether co-working spaces are a racket, and, oh yeah, that student debt that’s not going away any time soon).
We also break high-impact news about ongoing revelations about campus sexual assault, what our proprietary data tells us about graduate school budgets, and the dubious business practices of for-profit colleges. And we save room to tell you about the often weird and sometimes random zeitgeist, from new frontiers in online dating to whether you can rock Rihanna’s look at your entry-level temping gig.
Who you are:
Someone who can produce an average of three to five daily stories, from quick-hit news analysis to reported pieces mined from deep sourcing, as well as longer-lead enterprise stories, and write and edit a smart and addictive weekly newsletter. You have, or can develop, a robust and authoritative beat that includes but isn’t limited to: college controversies, the return on investment for higher education, starting salaries, navigating a new career and the vagaries of office culture, and managing stress in school and at work.
You write with a distinctive voice that’s irreverent but stops short of snarky, and that uses a foundation of reporting and beat development to put forth an authoritative point of view where appropriate. You get a thrill out discovering new and ever-more-obscure destinations to mine stories for the nugget of news that everybody else missed, from niche discussion boards to professors with something to say to student blogs to dry Department of Education data dumps. You get a rush from (or, at least, can handle) working fast and on deadline, and you’re good at quickly figuring out which stories are owed an in-depth treatment and which ones can be heralded with a few lines.
More things you should be able to do:
– Know, or know how to find out, what ambitious students and young professionals in their 20s and 30s are talking about in public and not-so-public spheres.
– Regularly break, expose or highlight news that’s relevant to this group, even if it may feel tangential to other Bloomberg readers
– Develop and regularly pitch enterprise story ideas while staying immersed in the beat and spinning out daily news items
– Be so well-versed in your beat that when news is broken by another outlet, you can quickly spin it forward by making connections to other news or targeting a source of smart analysis
– Be endlessly interested in the decisions, crises, anxieties and diversions that preoccupy young people who are trying to navigate the path through college and into the workforce
– Have an uncanny ability to spot stories EVERYWHERE and execute them quickly
– Have 1-3 years of reporting experience, a track record of very clean copy and above-average reporting skills, a smart and engaging voice, and an addiction to working quickly and well under deadline pressure
To apply, go here.
