Senior Correspondent

Location: Santa Cruz, on the highly livable and lively Central Coast of California, 1.5 hours south of San Francisco.

An in-office position reporting to the Managing Editor

Description:

Lookout Santa Cruz is now four-and-a-half-years old and we’ve successfully become the primary news medium for the people of Santa Cruz County, reaching about 60% of the adults in the county each month. We’ve established ourselves, and our model, as a full-service very good community newspaper that happens to be digital. We cover all the topics that matter to our readers, from government and education coverage to environment and health, and food and the arts. We’ve established ourselves as a go-to source of breaking news and accountability reporting, increasing our impact year-by-year.

We are honored and proud to have won the 2024 Pulitzer for Breaking News. It speaks to the excellence and teamwork of what we have built, a foundation for the next several years of growth.

Further, Lookout has recently expanded its network, with the highly successful launch of Lookout Eugene-Springfield, creating the second largest local newsroom in Oregon.

Learn more about Lookout:

Lookout Santa Cruz: https://lookout.co/
Lookout Eugene-Springfield: https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/
Lookout Expansion coverage
Lookout Pulitzer coverage

Now, we are adding a key position to our highly collegial newsroom — the largest and best covering all of Santa Cruz County, one intended to advance our reporting and drive the breadth and depth of the work we give readers each week.

Our connect-the-dots reporting has already won credit for readers for its work. With this position, we now can expand that impact.

This Senior Correspondent position will focus both on their own work and on working with the full team of correspondents, enhancing meaningful, in-depth reporting across our full range of coverage.

Major issues we’ve covered demand deeper and wider coverage, including deeper dives into the criminal system, law enforcement agencies and the courts. There are real issues of jail treatment, opioid overdose response and the familiar mental health challenges that communities face.

Affordability, the kind and nature of housing and economic development and homelessness head the list of issues the senior correspondent will help report and lead on. Further, the issues of our day – the local impacts of dramatic change in federal funding – pervades and will continue to dominate much coverage going forward.

The senior correspondent brings a fair, experienced, inventive and nuanced approach to these issues, surfacing fresh reporting. We expect a successful candidate to bring a rich background of accountability and watchdog work, including a knowledge of public records and data journalism, showing the ability to take on broader issues as well as breaking impactful news. The ideal candidate must have demonstrated a command of the reader-focused, people-driven, data-centric reporting that provides readers and communities what they want.

The correspondent will work both independently and collaboratively with editors and fellow correspondents to deepen and broaden our coverage. The demonstrated ability to collaborate is a must.

If you are interested, please respond with a cover letter describing your capabilities, demonstrating relevant experience and drive to this work, and include relevant examples of it.

Application Process: Please send your resume and cover letter to jobs@lookoutlocal.com and put “Senior Correspondent” in the subject line.

What We Offer:

Competitive salary and performance-based incentives.
Full-time benefits include highly competitive medical, dental, and optical benefits, and 401(k) with matching.
Good PTO allowances
An opportunity to make a significant impact on and contribute to the revival of local journalism.
A collaborative and mission-driven work environment.
Stock options in a growing company.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Lookout Eugene-Springfield is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Responsibilities:

Lead our accountability agenda, working with editors to identify and prioritize opportunities for investigative, enterprise and in-depth reporting across the newsroom.
Produce quick-turn and long-term accountability stories that meet the needs of a fast-paced newsroom.
Work with and mentor other reporters to develop in-depth stories on their beats and spanning multiple beats, including assisting with records requests and source development.
Be a newsroom leader on investigative tools, such as Nexis, public records and datasets (publicly available or compiled) that can be mined for stories.
Track an ongoing newsroom-wide database of FOIA and public records requests.

Essential Skills:

Eight to 10 years of experience as a daily news reporter, demonstrating significant accountability work.
Demonstrated proficiency with open records laws and libel laws.
Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and handle multiple and changing priorities simultaneously.
Excellent news judgment and outstanding writing and editing skills, including an ability to turn investigative reporting into compelling narratives.
Data journalism skills, particularly data collection and data analysis.
Comfort with the format of Lookout’s correspondent-focused model, and the personality it brings to the work.
Desire to work in an entrepreneurial, fast-growth startup environment, embracing the agility and flexibility required to thrive within a new business.