US Data Journalist

The role

The FT’s visual and data journalism team is looking for an experienced data journalist to cover US politics, economics and financial news. This is a full-time staff position.

The successful applicant will collaborate with US-based news editors and correspondents across North America as well as colleagues in London, Hong Kong and beyond. You’ll help us deliver compelling journalism on our core coverage areas of trade, economics and financial markets, as well as US electoral politics and campaign finance.

You will have a record of working self-sufficiently, from story pitch to final product, and an interest in providing a global perspective for both US and overseas readers. You will also collaborate with the wider Visual & Data Journalism team, and reporters and editors from across the FT’s network who need support applying data-driven methods to their work.

We are happy to consider candidates wishing to be based in Washington DC or New York City. External applicants must be eligible to work in the US.

Occasional weekend/flexible working may be required as part of covering fast-moving news.

Essential skills

You will have a strong portfolio of work in data journalism, ideally focused on business, finance, economics or politics in North America. In addition, we are looking for:

Experience using data journalism or data science techniques to find and tell news stories
Confidence using R or Python for data sourcing (including web scraping, APIs and large databases), cleaning and analysis
Excellent communication skills, particularly the ability to explain your quantitative analysis work simply to non-specialist audiences
A passion for continuously learning in order to keep your skills at the forefront of current practice
The ability to pitch, write and deliver original data driven stories

Desirable Skills

While this is not a graphics-production role, experience of using data visualisation effectively in reporting would be a distinct advantage.

In addition, while we don’t expect you to have all of these skills, any of the following would be beneficial, so please mention them in your cover letter and résumé:

Training in statistics, data science or quantitative social science methods
Experience building, maintaining or working with pipelines for continuously acquiring and processing data
Experience applying data analysis in financial or business journalism
Knowledge of working collaboratively with others on coding projects using version control systems such as Git
Familiarity with Adobe Illustrator