San Jose Mercury News seeks an assistant features editor

The Bay Area News Group is looking for a full-time Assistant Features Editor. You will join The Mercury News and East Bay Times features team. As an Assistant Editor on the Bay Area restaurant and food team, you will dramatically expand our coverage of one of the nation’s most vibrant food scenes into the diverse suburbs of the East and South Bays. You will contribute to writing feature stories and supervising two to three features reporters. This team covers not only classic restaurant coverage, but food and restaurant business trends and related topics, such as foodie TV, social media food trends, documentaries, festivals and more. If you are passionate about arts, food, entertainment and love telling stories, this is the role for you!

What you will do:

• Help direct coverage and edit staff and freelance stories about the restaurant/dining beat across the Bay Area, from Santa Cruz to Wine Country, including big picture trends in the industry with a consumer-focused approach
• Write two to three stories a week, a combination of quick-hits and enterprise, and guide monthly curated, best-of stories that explore restaurant niches
• Contribute one to two long-form articles and quick-read features on a wide range of topics for each of the Bay Area News Group’s seven premium magazines each year
• Will supervise 2-3 Reporters

What you will bring:

• 3+ years of daily journalism experience, including breaking news and editor duties
• Strong writing ability, digital fluency and strong skills in communication, leadership, organization, problem solving, flexibility and adaptability
• Demonstrated ability to edit and guide writers to produce sharp, clean copy, including headlines and nut graphs that distill why a story needs to be read and shared online, and facility in understanding and using metrics-driven data to inform coverage decisions
• Digital storytelling experience is also critical, and any candidate should have an intense curiosity for how news is consumed, shared and searched for on the internet
• Comfort working on digital deadlines in a 24/7 news cycle, and the drive to best the competition on a regular basis
• 4-year college degree (journalism or related fields)

Must be located in the Bay Area.

The annual salary is $64,000 – $67,000. 

To apply, submit a cover letter, resume and three to five links to feature stories published in the last year.

For more information click here.