The Minnesota Star Tribune is seeking a creative and entrepreneurial editor to help transform its college and women’s sports coverage.
You will succeed in this role by helping your reporters find and produce compelling news and enterprise stories about college athletes and teams across Minnesota, with an emphasis on the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, and the professional women’s sports teams, including the Lynx and Frost. Game coverage will play a secondary role to insightful and timely news scoops as well as enterprise, analysis and accountability reporting.
You should excel at all aspects of story development and will help your reporters create and deliver ambitious, useful and distinctive journalism beyond the traditional story format. You have a vision for how to make this journalism an indispensable part of our readers’ lives. You will constantly challenge yourself and your staff with a simple question: Is this something our readers would willingly pay to read?
The expected work week for this position is Tuesday-Saturday. Some night shift work will be required, especially during football season.
Pay for this position starts at $92,890 a year, based on the contract of the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild.
To apply:
Please upload a resume and a memo describing how you would approach the opportunity to build on our current college and women’s sports coverage and expand it.
Questions? Contact Sports Editor Ryan Kostecka, ryan.kostecka@startribune.com
You will:
- Collaborate with the sports editor, the sports audience editor and other news leaders to determine daily, weekly, and ongoing coverage strategies across multiple platforms.
- Ensure that reporters on your team are developing and implementing data- and audience-informed coverage plans for their topic areas.
- Be committed to growing the Star Tribune’s off-platform presence for this content.
- Be enterprising and entrepreneurial, with an eye for stories that inform, surprise and delight our audience.
- Adhere to best practices around analytics, search and discovery.
- Engage with community leaders, citizens and subscribers at forums and other events.
- Demonstrate personal leadership skills with an emphasis on respectful inclusion while driving for excellence.
- Effectively recruit, hire and train for a broad range of skill sets.
- Lead and deliver transformational edits on both day-to-day stories and major projects.
- Enforce deadlines on stories from the quick turn to the long-range.
- Work regularly from the Star Tribune’s downtown headquarters.
Qualifications:
- A bachelor’s degree in journalism or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experience.
- Sharp editorial judgment and the ability to work with reporters who have a wide range of experience on the beat — serving as a coach, manager and guide in a constantly changing news environment.
- A willingness to be involved in all aspects of story development, from initial framing to preliminary and final edits.
- The ability to lead a team through change as we restructure our expectations for beats and transition to focus on our digital platforms.
- A commitment to using and learning 21st century digital tools, tracking and analyzing online audience trends and building strategies to engage readers.
- Management skills that foster a creative and supportive culture.
- Communication and collaboration skills to work across a matrixed organization.
- Experience managing a budget, conducting timely performance reviews, and hiring.
- Ability to meet deadlines, prioritize assignments, track budgets and multitask in a high-pressure environment.
- A commitment to the Star Tribune’s standards, mission and values, including journalism that reflects the diversity of Minnesota and the Star Tribune’s audience.
