College & Women’s Sports Team Leader

The Minnesota Star Tribune is seeking a creative and entrepreneurial editor to help transform its college and womens sports coverage.

You will succeed in this role by helping your reporters find and produce compelling news and enterprise stories about college athletes and teams across Minnesota with an emphasis on the Gophers and the professional womens sports teams including the Lynx and Frost. Game coverage will play a secondary role to insightful and timely news scoops as well as enterprise analysis and accountability reporting around prominent issues such as recruiting diversity and gender equity the transfer portal the business of womens sports and the growing impact of name image and likeness rules.

You should excel at all aspects of story development and will help your reporters create and deliver ambitious useful and distinctive journalism beyond the traditional story format. You have a vision for how to make this journalism an indispensable part of our readers lives. You will constantly challenge yourself and your staff with a simple question: Is this something our readers would willingly pay to read

You will:

• Collaborate with the sports editor the sports audience editor and other news leaders to determine daily weekly and ongoing coverage strategies across multiple platforms.
• Be relentlessly audience centric. Ensure that reporters on your team are developing and implementing data- and audience-informed coverage plans for their topic areas.
• Be committed to growing the Star Tribunes off-platform presence for this content.
• Be enterprising and entrepreneurial with an eye for stories that inform surprise and delight our audience. Our readers most value news; insightful contextual enterprise reporting; and human-centered narrative not available elsewhere.
• Collaborate closely with the Star Tribunes Audience Product Consumer Growth and Revenue teams to ensure our journalism reaches its widest audience and adhering to best practices around analytics search and discovery.
• Engage with community leaders citizens and subscribers at forums and other events articulating how the Star Tribune lives its journalistic mission and values.
• Demonstrate personal leadership skills with an emphasis on respectful inclusion while driving for excellence.
• Effectively recruit hire and train for a broad range of skill sets.
• Lead and deliver transformational edits on both day-to-day stories and major projects.
• Enforce deadlines on stories from the quick turn to the long-range.
• Work regularly from the Star Tribunes downtown headquarters.
• The expected work week for this position is Tuesday-Saturday due to the preponderance of college sports events that happen on Saturdays. Some night shift work will be required especially during football season.

Qualifications:

• A bachelors degree in journalism or a related field or an equivalent combination of education and work-related experience.
• Sharp editorial judgment and the ability to work with reporters who have a wide range of experience on the beat serving as a coach manager and guide in a constantly changing news environment.
• A willingness to be involved in all aspects of story development from initial framing to preliminary and final edits.
• The ability to lead a team through change as we restructure our expectations for beats and transition to focus on our digital platforms.
• A commitment to using and learning 21st century digital tools tracking and analyzing online audience trends and building strategies to engage readers.
• Management skills that foster a creative and supportive culture.
• Communication and collaboration skills to work across a matrixed organization.
• Experience managing a budget conducting timely performance reviews and hiring.
• Ability to meet deadlines prioritize assignments track budgets and multitask in a high-pressure environment.
• A commitment to the Star Tribunes standards mission and values including journalism that reflects the diversity of Minnesota and the Star Tribunes audience.

To apply:
Please upload a resume and a memo describing how you would approach the opportunity to build on our current college and womens sports coverage and expand it.

Pay for this position starts at $92890 a year based on the H-scale level in the contract of the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild.

Questions Contact Sports Editor Ryan Kostecka