Editor / Project Manager, Covering Climate Collaborative

About the Covering Climate Collaborative

The Covering Climate Collaborative (CCC) is a collaborative journalism initiative of Local Media Association supporting two dozen local news organizations to cover the local impacts of climate change across the United States. The CCC advances LMA’s mission to drive innovation and sustainable business models for local news by developing new and innovative ways to report on, collaborate, share resources and fund essential reporting on local climate change.

Job Description, Functions, and Responsibilities

Summary

Key duties include leading the group on content strategy and content collaboration, creating and maintaining a content calendar, editing shared content, and managing relationships with collaboration partners. The Project Manager will work closely with the Chief Innovation Officer at Local Media Association, who is managing the Covering Climate Collaborative (CCC).

This is an independent contractor position at $50/hour up to 20 hours per week (one-year term, renewable or expandable to full-time subject to funding).

Detailed Responsibilities

Duties of the Project Manager include:

• Managing daily communications with all CCC participating newsrooms.
• Maintaining CCC external communications such as its website, newsletters, social media accounts, etc.
• Managing external relationships, including those with project funders and LMA.
• Managing and supporting CCC editorial collaboration projects.
• Managing potential recruitment of new CCC participants.
• Working with LMA on scheduling business transformation programming to support participating news organizations.
• Building awareness about the CCC with media organizations, journalists, university journalism programs, and community members.
• Organizing and facilitating convenings of journalists and community members.
• Monitoring the project budget.
• Authoring project and funding proposals and required grant reports.
• Assisting LMA executive team in seeking funding and resources that support the climate reporting ecosystem, and with sponsor, foundation, and donor relationships.
• Assisting in fundraising efforts, including identifying potential candidates, helping plan and attending pitches and helping manage local funder relationships.
• Staying current with local journalism collaborative efforts across the globe to help inform development of the CCC.
• Representing the collaborative publicly on conference panels, virtual sessions and in the media.
• Maintaining the technology and communications tools used to run the CCC, i.e. Airtable, Slack, Zoom, website etc.

Minimum Requirements and Competencies

The minimum job requirements and competencies include:

• Bachelor’s degree
• Experience in climate journalism
• Strong time-management and project-management skills
• Strong analytical, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills
• Excellent interpersonal, verbal and written communication skills
• Understand how to build and maintain positive community relationships and manage effective communication
• Comfort in working as lead of a virtual organization with little daily outside supervision
• Basic knowledge of financial statements and financial projections
• Ability to prepare business correspondence, proposal, summary, and reports using prescribed formats
• Ability to communicate distinctly and make presentations with poise and control
• Passion for empowering citizens of all backgrounds to participate in sustainable living and community building
• Multimedia and social media skills; knowledge of digital content management systems.
• Tech-savvy – ability to learn new technology and stay current with advances in digital journalism

How to apply

Please send a resume and cover letter describing your interest in the position; and contact information for three professional references. Kindly submit electronically to jobs@localmedia.org by April 30, 2022; no mailed submissions will be accepted. The Covering Climate Collaborative seeks and welcomes applicants of diverse backgrounds.