Data Journalist

The Markup is hiring a data journalist to join our award-winning, investigative newsroom. 

As a data journalist, you’ll use your data skills to equip readers with the knowledge and agency to drive change and to hold institutions accountable for the way they use technology.

At The Markup, we see data as core to our work and a driver of great journalism. We are looking for a data reporter who excels when working with other journalists to report and tell important stories about how technology affects the lives of everyday people. For example, we have looked into how L.A.’s scoring system for subsidized housing gave Black and Latino people experiencing homelessness lower priority scores and how internet service providers charge people in poorer, more diverse neighborhoods the same amount of money for slow internet as they charge people in richer neighborhoods for fast internet.

This role is a Guild position, full-time, and with benefits.

• Identify, plan, and execute simple and complex data analyses, interpret the results, and show your work—in service of our mission to challenge technology to serve the public good.
• Find and approach data journalism using many different types of skills and resources, including statistics, coding, public records, crowdsourcing, or anything else we haven’t thought of yet.
• Continue to learn new techniques, be creative, and continue to push The Markup forward in our data journalism.
• Work within and help improve the Markup’s data workflow, processes, and systems.
• Write documented, accessible code and transparent methodologies that demonstrate how you did your data analysis.
• Collaborate a lot, both with colleagues across departments at The Markup and with our newsroom partners. 
• Work to create journalism with impact. Expose wrongdoing; equip people, communities, organizations, and regulators with the critical information they need to drive reform; strive for the goal of institutional and systemic change.
• Share your expertise, whether that’s helping colleagues improve their data skills, doing a radio interview to help spread the word on the project you just published, or writing a piece that helps other journalists or anyone interested do what you did.
• Have the opportunity to pitch and develop your own stories, with support from editors.

We’ve done our best to list the relevant qualifications applicants might bring to this job below, but the list isn’t exhaustive—we highly encourage you to share with us other experiences and qualifications you have that may be valuable to this role.

We strongly encourage applicants with diverse experiences and backgrounds to apply. Research shows that underrepresented applicants often downplay their skills. Even if you believe that your experience doesn’t match the qualifications listed (and we certainly don’t expect candidates to be equally skilled in the areas we’ve listed), we still want to hear from you. Please apply!

We’re looking for someone with:

• Experience working on data-driven projects in a newsroom, academic, or research setting. In the journalism industry, we usually talk about this type of experience as “data journalism,” but in different contexts your work might have been called “data science” or “statistical analysis” or something similar.
• Attentiveness to detail and the ability to think critically. As part of The Markup team, you’ll use these skills to ask better questions, better evaluate when companies are obfuscating the truth about technology, and better pinpoint harmful practices that could be changed.
• Enthusiasm for talking to other people—like sources, experts, or colleagues—to help you better understand, audit, and analyze data and other reporting.
• A clear dedication to working collaboratively and inherent generosity around sharing credit with colleagues.
• Experience collecting hard-to-collect data, probably through web scraping. 
• Experience writing code to clean and analyze data. For example, you should have a solid understanding of how to analyze data in Python, R, SQL, or a similar language, and know how to start exploring anywhere from thousands to millions of data points in a systematic way.
• The ability to communicate clearly and frequently and meet deadlines (or communicate clearly beforehand about why a deadline cannot be met).

Pluses, but not requirements:

• Experience doing geographic data analysis
• Experience turning your data analysis into information graphics
• Experience with web design or product design
• Experience shipping or publishing tools that were used by the general public or consumers

We’ll start reviewing applications on Monday, June 5 and will continue to review applications afterward on a rolling basis. 

This is a full-time position with an expected salary range of $80,000 to $115,000, plus generous benefits, including paid time off and medical, vision, and dental insurance. Read more about The Markup’s benefits. We also want to encourage your leadership in our field, so we will support attending industry conferences and professional training.

The salary range above is our best estimate, in good faith, of what we expect to pay for this position. Our final salary figure will take into account the candidate’s experience and skills, as well as our commitment to pay our staff equitably.

The Markup is a remote workplace, but employees will be expected to travel from time to time, such as for reporting trips or events.

We are The Markup (https://themarkup.org/)—a nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism organization in New York City. With little accountability or oversight, technology is affecting how we vote, how we raise our kids, and who is able to get housing, jobs, health care, and have a comfortable life. People deserve to know more about how this is happening, who is being harmed, and what they can do about it. That’s where The Markup’s hard-hitting, investigative journalism comes in.

Our approach to investigative journalism is guided by the scientific method. We develop hypotheses and assemble data—through crowdsourcing, FOIAs, and automated data collection—to test our theories. We also strive to work in genuine partnership with local journalists and existing, local news organizations who have built trust with the communities they cover. We aim to equip people, communities, and organizations with information that helps them protect themselves when wrongdoing is exposed and that drives institutional and systemic change.

We also don’t take shortcuts, even if that means searching high and low for a newsletter platform that meets our privacy promise or taking the time to bulletproof an investigation. We pride ourselves on an organizational culture that is rigorous, collaborative, and courageous.

Our mission is woven into everything we do. We believe that at our best, our work drives tangible, positive change in the world, and we work deliberately and strategically to ensure our stories have as much impact as possible. Read more about how we think about impact at The Markup.

The Markup is committed to becoming an antiracist organization. As an organization led by women of color, we do our best to center justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in all that we do—of which hiring is just one part. We encourage you to ask us about what concrete steps we are taking in service of these ideals. We strongly encourage applicants who are people of color, LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, and/or formerly incarcerated people. A college degree is not required to apply for jobs at The Markup.

Come do your best work with us. We’re excited to meet you.

To apply, please fill out the form below. Here’s what you need to know about the form:

• Instead of a cover letter, we ask you a series of questions that get at the heart of what we’d like to know from all our candidates. 
• The projects you’ll submit and expound upon are an opportunity to showcase how you work, from the moment an idea sparks your interest to when it finally goes live.
• Use these questions as a way to address how your experience intersects with what we list in the “What we’re looking for” section above.
• We expect to give candidates a paid hiring test as a part of the interview process.

Please do not contact the hiring manager directly, and please do not send a résumé to staff at their individual email addresses.

If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, don’t hesitate to contact jobs@themarkup.org.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, country of origin, citizenship, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by local, state, or federal laws.