Tampa Bay Times seeks business reporter

The Tampa Bay Times, Florida’s largest newspaper, and tampabay.com are seeking a business reporter to cover the economy. This reporter also will cover several Florida industries and many of the region’s largest companies.

Florida and Tampa Bay are rich with economic news. There’s a struggling citrus industry, a volatile housing market and burgeoning tourism. But wages here are some of the lowest in the nation. You’ll cover the re-awakening economy with an eye toward who’s getting rich and who’s left behind.

The beat is a large one and the reporter will have a lot of flexibility, so we expect you to mine it for a lot of good stories – and to have a really great time doing it. This is a fun beat. It’s one of the higher-profile jobs at the newspaper. It’s competitive and will require you to stay ahead of everyone else online and to produce dailies for the newspaper’s front page. But there also will be time to dig deep and write front-page Sunday centerpieces with multi-media components on a regular basis.

While we value experience and previous time on a business beat is a plus, we also appreciate high energy and ideas. We’re not looking for someone who waits for news to come to them; we want someone who finds news, trends and patterns before anyone else and churns out engaging stories.

We expect you to be as much a digital journalist as you are a newspaper reporter. You should be active on social media, fluent in digital story-telling and open to emerging ideas and trends for online reporting and presentation.

Interested? Please send a resume, your five best clips and three story ideas to Business Editor Chris Tisch at christisch1@gmail.com. Deadline to apply is Feb. 13.