The Markup is hiring a data journalist to join our award-winning, investigative newsroom.
As a data journalist, you’ll use your data skills to equip readers with the knowledge and agency to drive change and to hold institutions accountable for the way they use technology.
At The Markup, we see data as core to our work and a driver of great journalism. We are looking for a data reporter who excels when working with other journalists to report and tell important stories about how technology affects the lives of everyday people. For example, we have looked into how L.A.’s scoring system for subsidized housing gave Black and Latino people experiencing homelessness lower priority scores and how internet service providers charge people in poorer, more diverse neighborhoods the same amount of money for slow internet as they charge people in richer neighborhoods for fast internet.
This role is a Guild position, full-time, and with benefits.
As a data reporter, you will:
- Identify, plan, and execute simple and complex data analyses, interpret the results, and show your work—in service of our mission to challenge technology to serve the public good.
- Find and approach data journalism using many different types of skills and resources, including statistics, coding, public records, crowdsourcing, or anything else we haven’t thought of yet.
- Continue to learn new techniques, be creative, and continue to push The Markup forward in our data journalism.
- Work within and help improve the Markup’s data workflow, processes, and systems.
- Write documented, accessible code and transparent methodologies that demonstrate how you did your data analysis.
- Collaborate a lot, both with colleagues across departments at The Markup and with our newsroom partners.
- Work to create journalism with impact. Expose wrongdoing; equip people, communities, organizations, and regulators with the critical information they need to drive reform; strive for the goal of institutional and systemic change.
- Share your expertise, whether that’s helping colleagues improve their data skills, doing a radio interview to help spread the word on the project you just published, or writing a piece that helps other journalists or anyone interested do what you did.
- Have the opportunity to pitch and develop your own stories, with support from editors.
What we’re looking for:
We’ve done our best to list the relevant qualifications applicants might bring to this job below, but the list isn’t exhaustive—we highly encourage you to share with us other experiences and qualifications you have that may be valuable to this role.
We strongly encourage applicants with diverse experiences and backgrounds to apply. Research shows that underrepresented applicants often downplay their skills. Even if you believe that your experience doesn’t match the qualifications listed (and we certainly don’t expect candidates to be equally skilled in the areas we’ve listed), we still want to hear from you. Please apply!
We’re looking for someone with:
- Experience working on data-driven projects in a newsroom, academic, or research setting. In the journalism industry, we usually talk about this type of experience as “data journalism,” but in different contexts your work might have been called “data science” or “statistical analysis” or something similar.
- Attentiveness to detail and the ability to think critically. As part of The Markup team, you’ll use these skills to ask better questions, better evaluate when companies are obfuscating the truth about technology, and better pinpoint harmful practices that could be changed.
- Enthusiasm for talking to other people—like sources, experts, or colleagues—to help you better understand, audit, and analyze data and other reporting.
- A clear dedication to working collaboratively and inherent generosity around sharing credit with colleagues.
- Experience collecting hard-to-collect data, probably through web scraping.
- Experience writing code to clean and analyze data. For example, you should have a solid understanding of how to analyze data in Python, R, SQL, or a similar language, and know how to start exploring anywhere from thousands to millions of data points in a systematic way.
- The ability to communicate clearly and frequently and meet deadlines (or communicate clearly beforehand about why a deadline cannot be met).
Pluses, but not requirements:
- Experience doing geographic data analysis
- Experience turning your data analysis into information graphics
- Experience with web design or product design
- Experience shipping or publishing tools that were used by the general public or consumers
We’ll start reviewing applications on Monday, June 5 and will continue to review applications afterward on a rolling basis.
To apply, go here.
