Financial Times seeks a data journalist in London

The Financial Times is seeking a data journalist or data scientist to join its award-winning Visual and Data Journalism team.

This role is in the team’s database projects group, which specializes in sourcing the data underpinning some of the FT’s highest-profile projects. Its recent work has included creating and maintaining coronavirus trackers as well as the poll tracking and live-updating electoral data from the 2020 US and 2019 UK elections. The team’s computational journalism examined the gender pay gap in UK companies, tracked populatist online influence campaigns and enabled FT investigations that uncovered irregularities in Congo’s presidential election.

Role and responsibilities

If using computational techniques in journalism fascinates you, this is the role for you. Your main focus will be on medium- to long-term data investigations and projects that involve building and maintaining automated pipelines for acquiring, cleaning and processing continuously-updating streams of data.

Beyond current projects like our coronavirus trackers and preparations for the 2022 US midterm elections, you’ll help drive our effort to automate analysis and reporting of other data-rich subjects, including a wide range of topics in financial markets, public policy and climate change.

In addition, you will also take on other data-handling tasks performed by the Visual & Data Journalism team, especially by undertaking shifts on the Editorial Statistics team that rapidly sources data for breaking news and graphics.

You will collaborate with the data journalists, graphics journalists and developers in the Visual & Data Journalism team, as well as  journalists from all other parts of the FT who need support applying computational methods to their investigations.

Weekend shifts will be required as part of the team rotation.

Essential skills

Your application should include a portfolio of work that demonstrates:

• Confidence in data sourcing (including the use of scraping techniques), cleaning and analysis using R

• Knowledge of working collaboratively with others on coding projects using version control systems such as Git

• Numeracy and the ability to think statistically

• Strong communication skills, particularly the ability to explain your quantitative analysis work simply to non-specialist audiences

• An interest in global economics, business and politics

• Passionate about continuously learning in order to keep your skills at the forefront of current practice

• Ideally your previous work will be in a journalism context, but academic work or presentations to business audiences could also be relevant to demonstrating these abilities.

Desirable Skills

We don’t expect you to have all of these skills, but the ability to demonstrate experience of one or more of the following would be beneficial:

• Relevant training in statistics or data science

• Building, maintaining or working with processes for continuously acquiring and processing data or maintaining models based on such data

• Applying data analysis in economic, business or financial journalism

• Interactive data visualisation using D3, React or Flourish

• Working with automation processes that use machine learning techniques, eg natural language generation tools, text analysis or document classification algorithms

• Writing data documentation for non-technical users

• Training and supporting others in data handling techniques

• Work related to climate change, political polling and elections, or coronavirus

Please submit your application via Workday by July 13.

To apply, go here.