Data Reporter

Summary

Join Lighthouse, an award-winning investigative newsroom, and become a Data Reporter. Collaborate with colleagues and partners to design and execute data-driven investigations, enhancing traditional reporting with data analysis. Wrangle data from various sources, including FOIAs and web scraping, and create Data Memos explaining data pipelines. Analyze data, interpret results, and communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Contribute to impactful journalism by exposing wrongdoing and driving reform. Share expertise by mentoring colleagues and presenting at conferences. The role requires strong communication, critical thinking, and collaboration skills, along with experience in data analysis using languages like Python, R, or SQL. The position offers a competitive salary, 25 paid vacation days, remote/hybrid work options, a company laptop, and support for professional development.

Requirements

• Excellent communication skills to ensure that traditional investigative journalists are able to realise the potential of data in their storytelling, including embedding in newsrooms, participating in brainstorming sessions and helping develop a road map for data-driven stories
• Critical thinking skills that enable you to see beyond the obvious stories to larger patterns that are hiding in the data
• Experience working on data projects in a newsroom or experience doing statistical or data-scientific analysis, either in academia or in another research setting
• 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, especially through web scraping
• Experience writing code to clean and analyse data. For example, you should have a solid understanding of how to analyse 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)
• The ability to both orally and in writing, simplify complex concepts into a form comprehensible to laypersons, in a way that helps Lighthouse Reports colleagues learn

Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities for data to enhance traditional investigative reporting to help editorial teams achieve their impact goals
• Collaborate with colleagues and newsroom partners to conceive of, design, document and execute data-driven investigations including brainstorming hypotheses, drafting investigation road maps and identifying relevant partners
• Wrangle data, including FOIA'ing for it, scraping it and cleaning it
• Write Data Memos that help staff and partners understand the data pipeline and how to marry data and traditional investigative reporting techniques
• Identify, plan, and execute data analyses, interpret the results, and show your work
• Find and approach data journalism using many different types of skills and resources, including coding, public records, crowdsourcing, or geo-spatial analysis
• Work within and help improve Lighthouse’s data workflow, processes, and systems
• Write documented, accessible code and transparent methodologies that demonstrate how you did your data analysis
• Work to create journalism with impact. Expose wrongdoing; equip people, communities, organisations, 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, presenting at conferences or writing a piece that helps others learn from your experience
• Bulletproof and spot-check data work done by other journalists on the team and in the newsroom and conduct code reviews for projects done by other data team members

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing data-driven investigations for journalism, academia or civil society
• Experience initiating and conducting a data-driven investigation
• Knowledge of global supply chain data and tracking
• Familiarity with geographic data analysis such as spatial regressions or visual display using ArcGIS
• Experience developing Machine Learning models
• Experience with data infrastructure engineering
• Familiarity with advanced social network analysis

Benefits

• 25 paid vacation days
• Remote or hybrid work set up depending on location
• Macbook or similar laptop
• Support for conferences, trainings and other events