Digital Journalist

Digital Journalist


Leicestershire

£Competitive + Company benefits

Full-time

Closing date: 24/07/2018

We are looking to appoint a Digital Journalist to join the Leicestershire Live team. You will be working out of the Leicester Mercury's busy city centre office. This is an excellent opportunity to replace a London-bound reporter. We want to hear from talented reporters who can find and tell stories in words, pictures, video and sound that engage our target audiences.

This role is multi-functional and flexible, requiring an NCTJ-qualified reporter to cover live stories, develop their own unique communities of interest - or 'patches' - find exclusives and be flexible enough to turn their hand to different types of story.

You will be a junior or senior reporter who is enthusiastic, positive and open-minded. You will also be able to show the ability and ambition to provide cover on the content desk if required.

Leicestershire Live's way of working requires every member of the team to be audience-focused and flexible. Live stories are at the heart of the operation and, as such, team members will need to have a flexible approach to working patterns and content.

About our business:

Leicestershire Live is one of the biggest sites of Reach plc, the award-winning portfolio of newspapers, websites and digital products Reach is one of the UK's largest multimedia companies, employing more than 6,000 people across 60-plus locations around the country.

Trusted, relevant, reliable and essential on social, mobile, desktop and in print, our loyal readers and advertisers are attracted by the knowledge, insight and vital services that our iconic brands (Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Daily Record and the Daily Mirror nationally, to name just a few) provide.

Key Responsibilities

The key feature to this role is to source, write and share high-quality, original stories, pictures and video for website, app and social media platforms, as directed by the content desk. You will have full ownership of a 'patch' - a community of interest, a place or an issue. You will work hard in developing and nurturing an audience of scale around this patch and create content that drives improving levels of engagement.

Working patterns

The smooth working of Leicestershire Live is driven from a carefully-constructed rota that is designed to allocate cover for the right roles and the right times of the day, evening and weekends. To ensure a fair distribution of shifts between the whole team, your role will involve some early, late and weekend working.

The Ideal Candidate

• Reach plc or equivalent journalist qualification (or relevant time-served experience)
• Excellent writing skills and experience writing professionally
• Understanding of digital publishing, including SEO
• Comfortable at getting out and about and making contacts
• Ability to shoot and edit video and audio
• Solid understanding of social media and comfortable using social publishing tools
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written
  Energy, enthusiasm and self-motivation
• Ability to work quickly and effectively under deadline pressure
  Ability to work well as part of a team
• Flexible approach to shifts
• Up-to-date legal and IPSO Code knowledge
• Full driving licence

Package Description

In addition to competitive salaries, bonus structures (if applicable) and a contributory pension scheme, Reach plc offer a whole host of voluntary flexible benefits. These include a car scheme, holiday purchase, childcare vouchers, cycle scheme, staff discounts, season tickets & parking loans and an employee assistance programme.

We are committed to equal opportunity for all. We may collect relevant data for monitoring as part of our candidate registration process. We will be reviewing applications as they are received so please don't delay in submitting your application.