News Editor at Code for Africa

About the Role:

The successful candidates will join CfA’s transnational iLAB digital forensic team to craft and manage the content production process and output for the iLAB team. 

As news editor, you will help shape the skills of other team members to enable them to become better writers and storytellers. You will guide the team to produce cutting-edge content, such as dossiers and short reports, that speak directly to the actions and advocacy needed. 

You will also track deadlines, interrogate findings from a journalist’s perspective and edit content from reports to investigative news stories. This means that you must be able to multitask in several different roles, including as a writer and an editor.

As part of a multinational team within a growing organisation, you must be agile and thrive in a multicultural environment. You will need to work easily with people from different backgrounds who may speak different languages.

Responsibilities:

• You will manage the iLAB diary and deadlines for reports, insights, and online content for our online platforms, ensuring that it is delivered on time, is well-written and meets rigorous editorial standards. 
• Managing the editorial production process and content diaries for the iLAB producing analytic and investigative reports.
• Scheduling and running the weekly ‘insights diary’ used to shape iLAB reports and investigative outputs.
• Ensuring that reports, briefing documents, presentations, news articles and social content are delivered on time by the relevant teams.
• Ensuring that analytical and investigative outputs are aligned with organisational goals and lead to meaningful outcomes.
• You will select and prioritise editorial leads for iLAB writers based on the analysts’ and forensic investigators’ trends and or algorithmic ‘listening’ or media monitoring tools to help ensure we focus our attention on the most harmful misinformation/conspiracies.
  You will facilitate editorial planning meetings at which editorial leads/assignments are brainstormed and allocated to in-country journalists/researchers, with clear editorial briefs and submission deadlines. 

Required:

• Minimum of ten years of newsdesk editorial management experience, preferably in a mainstream media or equivalent digital publishing environment.
• Demonstrable understanding of the step-by-step production process for creating well-researched and substantiated insights, reports and news reports, including familiarity with editorial diaries/schedules, editorial workflow, and content assignment/deadline management.
• Meticulous attention to detail, with the ability to work with congeniality in a deadline-driven environment. This includes being an organisational whiz who can prioritise multiple simultaneous tasks while at the same time having the people skills needed to engage diplomatically and collaborate effectively with colleagues under tight deadlines.
• Robust critical thinking and strong research and investigative skills, with good general knowledge and interest in current affairs.
• Excellent writing skills for creating clean and crisp content. 
• Excellent communication skills, including presenting research insights and shaping research outputs.
• The ability to collaborate with a diverse set of multidisciplinary project stakeholders.
• Experience in working with remote, distributed teams with agile methodologies.
• Proven track record for creative problem-solving in fast-paced impact-driven environments where solutions balance human and production considerations.
• Demonstrable ability to self-manage, creating your own and wider team timelines and milestones with clear systems/processes.
• Proficiency in collaborative work solutions such as Google Workplace (Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc.), Slack (or equivalents such as Teams), and project management tools like Trello (or equivalents).