We're Hiring A Senior Visual Journalist
FiveThirtyEight is seeking a collaborative and creative Senior Visual Journalist to join our data and interactives team. Senior Visual Journalists are design leaders in the FiveThirtyEight newsroom. Though they serve primarily as individual contributors, they also amplify the work of the team by mentoring more junior visual journalists, thoughtfully giving and receiving feedback and leading by example. We’re looking for a seasoned designer and developer who will exercise strong news judgment, bring a sharp eye for detail and hold our work to the highest standards.
The Senior Visual Journalist will report to the Editorial Director of Data Analytics and work closely with the rest of the interactives team as well as reporters and editors across the newsroom. This full-time role with benefits is a U.S.-based position. This is a hybrid role with our offices in New York City or Washington, D.C. We have a preference for candidates based in those areas. Interested candidates should apply through the Disney jobs portal.
Responsibilities:
- Producing highly polished, visually impactful stories and projects that attract, excite and engage our readers.
- Leading the design process for larger projects, including our 2024 election forecast, by creating principles, specifications and other documentation that enable work to be delegated to the team.
- Contributing to a rotation of daily charts production and “seconding” less experienced visual journalists.
- Inspiring, mentoring and guiding teammates and colleagues in their visual work.
- Participating in larger strategic conversations about visual style, site design, branding, accessibility and more.
- Giving thoughtful, candid feedback to peers, colleagues and managers and openly receiving it in turn.
Basic Qualifications:
- Three or more years of relevant experience.
- Proficiency using design software, particularly Adobe Illustrator.
- Fluency in JavaScript and one or more libraries used for creating graphics, preferably D3, along with a functional understanding of the “full stack” of web-development technologies.
- Fluency in basic statistics — for example, a conversational understanding of concepts such as margin of error and regression analysis.
- Eagerness to collaborate with other visual journalists, computational journalists, reporters and editors across the newsroom.
- Experience working on deadline.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Five or more years of relevant experience.
- A solid understanding of U.S. politics, particularly electoral politics.
- Full-stack development experience, ideally using JavaScript/Node.
- Experience with statistical programming languages, particularly R.
- Experience with cartography and mapping tools, such as QGIS and TopoJSON.
- Experience with product design, such as user research, rapid prototyping and user testing.
Interested candidates are strongly encouraged to apply even if they don’t meet every qualification.