Maiduguri Bureau Chief at Daily Trust

Location: Maiduguri, Borno

Job Description

• Daily Trust newspaper and Trust TV are looking for a very talented, creative and editorially sound person with a vast understanding of the northern Nigerian media market and culture to lead our Borno/North-East regional editorial team across traditional and new platforms.

Responsibilities

• As a senior team leader reporting jointly to the Daily Trust General Editor and Trust TV News Editor, you are tasked with the responsibility of transforming our editorial team into a full-fledged multimedia section and ensuring that our editorial standards are maintained across all platforms.
• This will involve working with the existing structure to creatively enhance our output from the region by focusing more on original, investigative and human-interest stories without neglecting the breaking news aspect. 

Competencies and Key Responsibilities

• To provide strong editorial leadership for the MTL team in the region, ensuring that our output conforms to our editorial guidelines and meets our audience’s needs.
• To edit and coordinate the regional coverage across Print, TV and Digital platforms. 
• To assess and ensure that the teams have the capacity and skills-set necessary to discharge their responsibilities. 
• In collaboration with the regional manager, maintain contacts with all agencies – in both the public and commercial sectors - which have a bearing on Media Trust’s effectiveness in the target area. 
• To maintain the highest standards of work through briefings, content reviews and feedback. To manage challenging staffing issues with the support of the Regional Manager and where necessary the Managing Editor.
• Ability to make sound and quick editorial judgment, manage emotions and lead others to find a way out when put under pressure or working under a tight deadline.
• Serve as a change agent by ensuring that best practices are clearly communicated and shared between teams.

Qualifications

• Be a trained journalist and/or have a strong journalistic background with a Bachelor’s Degree / HND in Journalism, Communications, or related field.
• A minimum of at least 5 years of working experience.
• Experience in multiplatform reporting and presenting.
• Have balanced and objective judgement based on a thorough understanding of editorial guidelines, target audience, programme and department objectives.
• Knowledge in editing and different storytelling techniques
• Advanced skills in using Adobe programmes (Premiere, Photoshop and After Effects).
• Ability to work effectively and quickly on more than one project at the same time.

The Ideal Candidate:

• The person must be fluent in written and spoken English with a track record of reporting experience; a deep understanding of the region, digital trends and proven newsroom leadership experience.
• He/she should have the ability to communicate with senior management and external partners.

TV skills:

• Has an accomplished reporting and presentation style which is fluent, engages the viewer and reflects the values of the channel.
• Broadcast in a manner that is understandable by a non-specialist audience.
• Provide clear treatments and proposals for stories by ensuring consistency of content, quality and style.
• Prepare, coordinate, and edit on-air material for daily news and current affairs programmes for TV. 
• Work under extreme deadline pressure to create compelling TV stories. 
• Make the best use of new technologies - in particular developments in social media in delivering our programmes to audiences and to set an example in learning to operate new systems and adapting to different working methods.