Newsroom Developer

Job Description:

Star Tribune is looking for a newsroom developer with a strong journalism background and deep programming experience to further an ambitious expansion of its digital newsroom team. This person will work closely with the data and digital design teams, along with editors and reporters to develop innovative storytelling and news products for all digital platforms. S/he will experiment with and create immersive applications for both the web and mobile platforms that prioritize reader engagement and storytelling. In addition, this person will engineer tools that assist journalists in producing interactive elements.

Candidates should be comfortable working in a sandbox environment where product development takes you from conception to building to iteration to testing to evaluation in partnership with others. The role within the newsroom will be part idea generator and part architect.

Responsibilities:

• Helps manage demands of daily news as well as broadly innovates solutions for large or ongoing projects
• Functions as part of a team that can represent the newsroom and the needs of its storytelling and presentation in new technology and platform discussions
• Helps devise editorial strategy to take innovative concepts from experiments to well-executed systems (e.g. immersive long-form, alternative story forms, data-driven projects, reader-engagement enterprises, storytelling tools)
• Works in collaboration with digital department developers and IT engineers improving both internal and public-facing news tools and applications

Qualifications:

Newsroom experience, visual journalism, computer science or related discipline and 2+ years experience at a multi-platform news organization. Experience in cross-functional teams is desired; project management experience preferred.

Because of the changing technology inherent to the job, an ability to learn on the fly, adapt to shifting platforms and technology over time and work in a maintainable infrastructure and framework will be key to success. The ability to write clean, scalable code is a must.

Preferred programming experience:

• Experience with databases e.g. MySQL, Redis, or MongoDB
• Experience with web programming languages and frameworks. Preferrably PHP/TWIG, but experience with Python/Django or Ruby/Rails is helpful.
• Fluency with current HTML and CSS framework standards
• Mapping and GIS tools, e.g. ArcGIS, Mapbox
• Javascript experience. e.g. jQuery, Node.js, Angular.js, Backbone.js, Leaflet.js
• Familiarity with source controls like Subversion or Git is a plus

Apply online at link included