The Kansas City Star, winner of nine Pulitzer Prizes, is seeking a creative, high-energy journalist to join our team as an Audience Development Strategist.
This Audience Development Strategist will be responsible for helping deepen The Star’s relationship with targeted suburban communities using digital and in-person audience engagement tactics.
You will join our Audience Service team, a hybrid group of innovative audience strategists and reporters helping Kansas Citians live their best lives. This position will be keenly focused on serving The Star’s mission to engage our audience in specific local suburban communities including Olathe, Kansas, and Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
The successful candidate will bring a commitment to meeting the information needs of local readers, a willingness to represent The Star at community events, an audience-focused approach to writing and a curiosity about how to measure the impact of engagement journalism.
This Audience Development Strategist will work with Star reporters whose coverage connects with the targeted suburban communities. You will be expected to build connections with organizations in our coverage area, write and curate 3-4 weekly newsletters to reach specific communities, and assist in developing, executing and measuring the success of The Star’s in-person event programming. There is potential for this strategist to edit stories and columns submitted to The Star by freelance writers and community organizations.
As a member of the Audience Service team, you will on occasion help with producing The Star’s flagship morning and afternoon newsletters and help identify strong alert opportunities connected to the local communities you are serving.
This position is based in the Kansas City metro area and reports to The Star’s Assistant Audience Service Editor. We expect this position to work Monday-Friday schedules typically and, on occasion, a Chiefs game audience editing shift. Our team often collaborates with colleagues in other McClatchy newsrooms including The Wichita Eagle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Our Audience Strategists are focused on three areas of audience journalism: Engaging readers, retaining readers and attracting new readers to The Star. Examples of responsibilities in each of these categories for this role include:
Engaging Readers
- Build a network of sources in the target communities so our newsletters can help to inform, delight and engage readers.
- Identify community-based stories that show the diversity of experiences in targeted communities.
- Coach and collaborate with journalists on digital headlines.
- Experiment with new tools and platforms.
- Collaborate with the AME for Engagement & Experimentation to organize events and other community outreach programming that engages our local audience in targeted suburban communities.
Retaining Readers
- Coordinate and write The Star’s newsletters focused on targeted suburban communities to grow and engage our local audience and subscribers.
- Implement digital audience and journalistic best practices to serve our local and loyal audiences, particularly our subscribers.
- An interest in understanding our audience analytics and how we can adjust our strategy to grow our audience in these suburban communities.
Attracting New Readers
- Identify key new audiences, and launch engagement efforts to connect with target communities.
- Build and manage content-focused social media campaigns on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms that elevate our journalism. The ideal candidate will write sharp, concise, clean social copy to help readers understand and engage with the local news that affects their daily lives. The candidate should be prepared to coach newsrooms on the best social media practices.
Keen news judgment, strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate with colleagues – both local and remote – are musts.
We ask that you bring a positive attitude, an excitement to connect with The Star’s subscribers, and a willingness to listen to community feedback.
You’ll join a team that is fun, creative and always looking for new ways to connect and inform our diverse audience across platforms. The newsroom you’ll join is deeply committed to listening to, engaging with and meeting the needs of our neighbors across the Kansas City metro area.
Kansas City is a vibrant, large city with a high quality of life – replete with iconic professional sports teams and a world-class arts scene – and a low cost of living relative to cities its size. It’s a fantastic place to put down roots, and this job offers the chance to contribute to its future.
McClatchy Media’s journalists are expected to take advantage of opportunities to ethically harness and leverage artificial intelligence and other automation to enhance and elevate their work and to find efficiencies that free them to focus on source-building and high quality, deeply reported journalism.
We believe that our team is stronger when we include individuals with a variety of perspectives and experiences, and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.
A Successful Candidate Will Bring Many Of The Following
- Passion for news and love for experimentation.
- Excellent communication skills, including leading training and coaching sessions around building audiences.
- A familiarity with communities in the Kansas City area.
- Familiarity with how to measure success using audience metrics and analytics.
- College degree or equivalent work experience.
- At least 1-3 years of audience engagement, strategy or reporting experience.
- Experience managing social media accounts, and working knowledge of SEO concepts and Google Trends to grow our readership, especially among potential subscribers.
- Understanding of social media best practices.
- Understanding of newsletter best practices.
- Ability to use analytics tools to make real-time decisions for elevating our journalism and developing related digital strategies.
- An independent spirit that can make decisions quickly and can handle several tasks at once.
- Excellent news judgment and a demonstrated ability to “see the story” that is going to matter to readers.
- Proven ability to work with cross-functional teams.
What We’ll Bring
As a journalist at McClatchy, you will join a supportive, flexible, collaborative team. McClatchy strives to be an employer of choice, and our benefits package is made with this goal in mind. With a focus on health, well-being, wealth and daily life, our package options include health care coverage for employees and their families, financial protection from expected and unexpected expenses, multiple no-cost wellness resources and even coverage for four-legged friends.
Our overall benefits package also includes a 401(k) with employer match, competitive paid time off and corporate holidays, and a variety of mental health benefits. With an excellent support team and with focus on your well-being as a top corporate strategy, McClatchy provides benefits to support you and your family in achieving your health and wellness goals. For more information on McClatchy's benefit plan, please visit McClatchyLivewell.com.
To apply, include a persuasive cover letter, your resume and four to six examples of your best work.
