Categories: Journo Jobs

The Motley Fool seeks an editor

The Motley Fool is on the lookout for an uber-talented editor to join our team.

This is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-dirty editing job for our suite of behind-the-paywall investing websites, from rewriting entire articles down to making sure the punctuation is perfect.

You’ll be on the lookout for problems of clarity, logic, grammar, style, and accuracy, helping to ensure that we’re creating compelling, error-free, and Foolish investment advice for our paying members.

You’ll be working with a team of financial experts, writers, analysts, fact-checkers, and kick-butt fellow editors to produce investing and personal finance information that educates, amuses, and enriches the members of our investment services.

As editor, you’ll play a lead role in getting our investment advice in perfect condition for publication, whether that entails translating from finance into Foolish or simply polishing the finer points.

But why stop there? We also want you to come up with all sorts of ways we could improve our investment services and the company — you’ll have that kind of power! To do all those things, you’ll need to be technologically savvy, interested in business, and scary smart. It helps if you’re interested in investing because you’ll be focusing on the topic for roughly half of your waking life.

This position calls for a lot of juggling, so we need someone who is intelligent, adaptable, patient, meticulous, reliable, and cool under deadline pressure. Therefore, we really need someone with at least a couple years’ experience working for a daily, weekly, or monthly publication.

Primary Responsibilities/Objectives

  • Makes substantive edits to content for clarity, grammar, in-house style, and general Foolish tone
  • Keeps track of the workflow for regularly scheduled content and assigns special features as needed
  • Works with content management system to publish articles online, send emails to members, and update websites
  • Makes strategic decisions about content based on user engagement data
  • Helps improve investing products to better meet members’ needs
  • Plays a leadership role in the investing team
  • Responds to members’ questions and requests

Core Competencies

  • Ability to leap tall buildings and catch typos in a single bound
  • Willingness and confidence to tear apart an article and put it back together so that it is a better read — without introducing mistakes in the process
  • Attention to detail
  • Ability to see the investment service from The Motley Fool’s bigger business picture – and work with other stakeholders to improve it (tech Fools, marketing Fools)
  • Ability to work well in a team-oriented environment
  • Ability to work under extreme deadline pressure
  • Ability to prioritize and organize multiple projects
  • Ability to work well with Fools at all levels — i.e., diplomacy
  • Ability to roll with the punches — and give a few, too
  • Dependability and consistency
  • Willingness to learn about the guts of financial statements

To apply, go here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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