Data Reporter
Lighthouse Reports, Netherlands
Job Description
Lighthouse Reports is an award-winning nonprofit newsroom that undertakes public interest investigations in partnership with some of the world’s leading media. Our teams work on investigations that cover migration, climate, conflict and corruption, serving multiple platforms, crossing borders, languages and formats.
Lighthouse builds teams around topics that provide editors tools, specialists and resources with the results reaching diverse publics on media relevant to them. We’re not a publisher so we channel all of our energy and resources into collaborations. We lead complex transnational investigations that blend freedom of information laws and money trails with emerging techniques like open source and data science.
Our data team supports Lighthouse and partner newsrooms to carry out data-driven investigations and enhance ongoing investigations with data while maintaining high standards of transparency and reproducibility.
As a data reporter, you will:
- Collaborate with colleagues and newsroom partners to conceive of and execute data-driven investigations including brainstorming hypotheses, contributing to reporting plans and identifying relevant partners.
- Wrangle data, including FOIA'ing for it, scraping it and cleaning it.
- Write Data Memos that help staff and partners understand the data pipeline and how to marry data and traditional investigative reporting techniques.
- Identify, plan, and execute data analyses, interpret the results, and show your work.
- Find and approach data journalism using many different types of skills and resources, including coding, public records, crowdsourcing, or geo-spatial analysis.
- Work within and help improve Lighthouse’s data workflow, processes, and systems.
- Write documented, accessible code and transparent methodologies that demonstrate how you did your data analysis.
- Work to create journalism with impact. Expose wrongdoing; equip people, communities, organisations, and regulators with the critical information they need to drive reform; strive for the goal of institutional and systemic change.
- Share your expertise, whether that’s helping colleagues improve their data skills, presenting at conferences or writing a piece that helps others learn from your experience.
- Bulletproof and spot-check data work done by other journalists on the team and in the newsroom and conduct code reviews for projects done by other data team members.
Requirements
The ideal candidate will have:
- Excellent communication skills to ensure that traditional investigative journalists are able to realise the potential of data in their storytelling, including embedding in newsrooms, participating in brainstorming sessions and helping develop a workflow for data-driven stories.
- Critical thinking skills that enable you to see beyond the obvious stories to larger patterns that are hiding in the data.
- Experience working on data projects in a newsroom or experience doing statistical or data-scientific analysis, either in academia or in another research setting.
- Enthusiasm for talking to other peoplelike sources, experts, or colleaguesto help you better understand, audit, and analyze data and other reporting.
- A clear dedication to working collaboratively and inherent generosity around sharing credit with colleagues.
- Experience collecting hard-to-collect data, especially through web scraping.
- Experience writing code to clean and analyse data. For example, you should have a solid understanding of how to analyse data in Python, R, SQL, or a similar language, and know how to start exploring anywhere from thousands to millions of data points in a systematic way.
- The ability to communicate clearly and frequently and meet deadlines (or communicate clearly beforehand about why a deadline cannot be met).
Pluses, but not requirements:
- Experience doing geographic data analysis
- Experience turning your data analysis into accessible explainers
- Experience with web design or product design
- Experience working on cross-border investigations preferably in the Global South
- Experience working with cloud computing infrastructure such as AWS
Benefits
Competitive salary in the European non profit journalism. Fully remote position with travel and training budget.