Computational Journalist at Dallas Morning News
Ariana Giorgi
The Dallas Morning News is looking for a computational journalist to join its newsroom.
The right candidate has a complementary mix of code skills and journalism chops. She or he will help in our emphasis on developing our interactive, graphic and otherwise visual storytelling online while continuing The News' tradition of statistically sophisticated and data-dense accountability journalism.
The position will be part of The News' Data and Interactives team, but whoever fills it will range across beats to support data-driven and visual journalism all over the newsroom. She or he will build their own storytelling through online graphics, dataviz and maps; help develop newsroom tools and collaborate with reporters, editors and photographers to craft interactives.
The right candidate has sound news judgment, is a facile writer of code (and sometimes copy), works easily across departments within the newsroom and coolly manages deadlines.
Applicants should:
- Have at least one year of experience turning careful, data-driven analyses into compelling graphics and dataviz using a web-native visualization library like D3.js.
- Be proficient with front-end technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Experience with a front-end JavaScript framework is a plus.
- Be proficient in a scripting language (Python's our choice) enough so that you could write a simple Web scraper or use it to clean an unruly data set. Experience with a server-side Web framework like Django is a plus.
- Have experience cleaning complex datasets for analysis and visualization, hopefully within a web-standard database like PostgreSQL.
- Have sound understanding of basic statistical principles. Competence with statistical software like R and dataviz packages like ggplot2 earns bonus points.
- Have experience producing clean code with clear documentation and collaborating on development projects. Made open-source software before? Awesome. Tell us about it.
- Have a Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.
Interested? Questions? Contact me at agi...@dallasnews.com or my editor John Hancock at jhan...@dallasnews.com. Apply here.