Help Us Create News Experiences That Inspire and Inform Real-World Action
How can we make it easier for audiences to participate in the news gathering process? How can we facilitate better connections between audiences and journalists? And how can we create news applications that both inform and inspire offline actions?
These are some of the questions ProPublica will be tackling this summer during a 10-week Civic News Lab. We're seeking two Civic News Fellows to help develop and test tools and features that make it easier for communities to collaborate in the creation of public interest journalism.
Fellows will work with ProPublica's engagement, design and news applications teams to create a series of experiments that help us better engage with our audience, and analyze and measure their contributions to our journalism.
For examples of ProPublica's crowd-powered news projects, see:
- our Patient Harm Facebook community and Voices of Patient Harm project
- our collaborative research and crowdsourcing with Vietnam veterans
- our Free the Files effort to crowdsource campaign spending
What we're looking for
Developers and other technologists who are passionate about civic engagement and journalism, and eager to use their skills to facilitate better relationships between our journalists and the communities we serve. You should have experience working with databases and web programming (ProPublica develops interactive databases with Ruby and Python). And most of all, you should be a creative thinker and problem solver who's able to collaborate with people of different backgrounds to find solutions to complex problems. If you've got some front-end and design experience, even better.
ProPublica is committed to diversity and especially encourages members of underrepresented communities to apply. You must be eligible to work in the U.S. Selected fellows will work in our NYC headquarters from June to August.
The process
We'll be accepting applications here through March 25; finalists will be contacted for interviews by March 30. Selected fellows will receive a $9,000 stipend and $1,000 travel budget.
Award: $9,000 stipend plus up to $1,000 for travel
Deadline to apply: March 25
Selections announced: April 22
Program: June 6 — Aug. 12 (10 weeks)
