Deputy Managing Editor

Deputy Managing Editor

Job objectives

Lighthouse Reports is an award-winning investigative newsroom working with some of the world’s leading media to deliver deeply reported, public interest investigations. We build newsrooms around topics and innovate new approaches to accountability journalism focused on migration, climate, conflict and corruption. We’ve co-published series and investigations with more than 120 partners around the world. We work across media formats from television and documentary to news and radio, podcasts, print and online.

We’re hiring a Deputy Managing Editor to strengthen and oversee our processes to produce impactful investigative journalism in alignment with our mission and values. You’ll help us develop workflows that recognise and streamline existing strengths and diverse ways of working to unlock the potential for our journalism to go further. 

Lighthouse is committed to moving away from some of the dysfunctional norms of newsrooms past. The key responsibility of the Deputy Managing Editor is to build systems that support inclusive and impactful journalism, harness talent across the organisation and enhance internal and external collaboration. 

The Deputy Managing Editor will help build leadership across the team and ensure effective project management towards the publication of investigations that facilitate transparent and well documented investigative pipelines and encourage robust practices for inclusive communications and engagement in investigations. 

Application deadline is May 13.

NOTE: Applicants who use ChatGPT, or similar, in preparing answers to application questions will not be considered for the next stage.

Job responsibilities

Editorial Leadership

Coordinate the pitch process. Spot stories and feed into the process of story selection based on alignment with newsroom, team and organisational priorities and capacity. 

Identify editorial workflow challenges impacting investigation quality and impact and design solutions that are flexible to the needs of different skill sets and teams.

Define clear metrics of success for systems, track how it’s going and iterate with input from the team.

Develop internal communications that encourage an inclusive, collaborative investigative process with clear lines of responsibility. Help build a culture that enables more people to find latent potential to contribute to work across silos. 

Collaborative Workflow

Lead editorial knowledge management, including our documentation, templates and best practices.

Coordinate editorial processes, such as fact checking and legal review.

Learn what’s important to our collaborators as well as their ongoing information needs and use that feedback to strengthen our approach to partnership.

Develop processes for various partnership models as part of the workflow including partnership selection based on editorial and impact goals, establishing division of responsibilities and mapping out production pipeline. 

External Communications

Support the development of Lighthouse’s external communications strategy

Ensure external communications align with Lighthouse’s impact goals and production partners’ objectives

Early projects may include

Begin designing an investigation management tool.

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Lighthouse’s processes for choosing which investigations to pursue.

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Lighthouse’s current processes for conducting and documenting investigations.

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Lighthouse current approach to collaboration with publications and develop a collaboration process.

Developing an external communications workflow for investigations.

Develop, model and train people on a harmonised collaborative investigative process.

Requirements

Editorial: Experience leading teams of reporters through ambitious journalistic projects. 

Project management: 5+ years experience managing projects in a newsroom environment with at least two years of experience managing journalists and editing a variety of story formats.

Change management: Experience bringing about organisational change and operating during and through uncertainty, ambiguity and in a fast-paced environment. Flexibility, diplomacy and recognition of the value inherent in different work styles.

Excellent verbal and written English as well as interpersonal communication and diplomatic skills. Other languages a plus.

Product thinking: Understanding of the key ingredients of product development.

Systems thinking: Can quickly evaluate root causes of organisational challenges and overcome roadblocks to collaboration. Can leverage the tools at hand, rather than being dependent on a specific software solution. Experience vetting news vendors is a plus.

Facilitation: Experience facilitating group brainstorms and discussions to drive alignment. Ability to keep discussions moving forward and toward actionable insights.

Leadership: Experience leading through influence, without direct reporting lines.

Prioritisation: Ability to prioritise work autonomously, yet proactively reach out for help when needed or when there are significant trade offs to consider.

Communication: Ability to communicate complex ideas, goals and problems in a way that is accessible and actionable for people with different skill sets.

Benefits

• Salary range: €55,000 - 65,000 per year, depending on experience
• Remote or hybrid work set up depending on location
• New Macbook or similar laptop
• Paid vacation
• Support for some conference and other event participation