San Jose daily seeks residential real estate reporter

The Bay Area News Group publishes The Mercury News, the East Bay Times and the Marin Independent Journal in one of America’s most beautiful and fascinating regions. We’re the dominant media company in the Bay Area and part of California’s largest news gathering organization, reaching tens of millions of people in print and online. Our coverage of the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland last year earned journalism’s highest award, the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

Job Description

We’re assembling a high-powered team to cover the area’s housing shortage, an affliction driving residential real estate prices that are a national phenomenon and a local obsession. To anchor the team’s work, we’re looking for a journalist who combines exceptional critical thinking skills with a strong foundation in data — finding it, understanding it, and manipulating it in creative ways to tell the untold story of an unprecedented real estate boom.

Qualifications

This is a reporting and writing job, not simply number crunching. The successful candidate will be able to sift census data, state department of finance numbers and the like, extracting telling nuggets and turning them into story ideas and stories. Applicants should have strong experience with relational databases and SQL. We prefer candidates familiar with collecting, cleaning and manipulating data by scraping websites and using APIs, performing data analysis with tools such as Python, and negotiating with government officials for access to public data sets. Three years experience at a major news organization or other high-level journalism outlet is recommended. If interested, please share your resume and at least three examples of data-driven journalism.

To apply, go here.