Journalist (Data Journalist) at BBC

Job Reference: BBC/TP/590126/55752
Department: BBC Africa Service
Contract Type: Fixed-term
Contract: 12 month fixed term contract/attachment
Job Category: Journalism
Business Unit: News - WSG World Service

Job Description

• As a member of the Lagos innovation team, you will be part of one of the largest offices of the BBC World Service and work alongside some of the most creative and dynamic professionals of the BBC.  
• As a data journalist, your mandate is to create innovative and engaging digital content for African and global audiences.
• You will work closely and collaboratively with West Africa services to deliver the best service for BBC audiences while also exchanging ideas and best practices with the East Africa languages Visual Journalism team and, when possible, creating joint projects.

Role Responsibilities

• The purpose of the visual journalism team is to unlock the potential of multimedia storytelling across all our platforms - mobile, desktop, tablet and TV. By using graphical tools and combining data and journalistic rigour, the team aims to produce powerful visual explanations that improve understanding of the news.

Key responsibilities for this role:

• To enhance and explain major news stories.
• To research, write, coordinate, manage and deliver to tight deadlines the production of high-quality added-value digital content including information graphics, maps, graphical interactives, multimedia explainers, data journalism, data visualization and other bespoke-format web content.
• To generate ideas for data-driven stories and for how they might be developed and visualised for a variety of platforms.
• To collaborate with reporters, editors, and the fellow team's designer and developer to bring those stories to a publication.
• To participate and contribute to the wider Visual Journalism Community, with the Central BBC News Visual Journalism team and the other VJ Languages teams.
• To make the most of data and visual journalism tools and workflows to create content of the high editorial and technical standards.
• To be aware of relevant advances in web technology and how they can enhance the team’s output.
• Support fellow African Hub journalists to make the most of the available tools, to improve commissioning and workflows.
• To represent the West Africa hub within the BBC Visual Journalism community.
• To exchange regular notes and ideas with colleagues from the East Africa Languages Visual Journalism team.

Requirements
The Ideal Candidate:
Data:

• Numerate - ability to understand spreadsheets and create them in Excel and Google Drive for stories  data sharing
• Knowledge of data sources and FOI procedure, if relevant, as it pertains to your region
• A strong grasp of how to clean and query data
• A good understanding of statistics and statistical analysis

Production:

• Be able to use basic design software (like Photoshop) to make composite images as well as create and update and create basic templates for static content for social media - whichever platforms are most relevant.
• Good visual awareness and web production experience
• Experience in visualising data and using visualisation tools
• Demonstrable experience of working to tight deadlines.