Job Description:
Keep track of relevant events—either happening on the South Side, involving prominent South Siders, or otherwise more broadly relevant—on a weekly basis, compiling them into a calendar before Monday night production.
Pitch and edit several stories a month, or as your schedule allows. These can be shorter, event-coverage stories, interviews, or longer feature stories—or ideally a mix of all three.
- You’ll be working with writers of all experience levels. Sometimes stories will require more edits and more time than others. We expect editors to be responsive and respectful of this, and to be willing to learn how to work with writers of all backgrounds.
- Coordinate with managing editors, visuals editors, and fact-checker to schedule the piece and ensure that it has an appropriate visual component and that it has been fact-checked.
- Work to build a network of contacts.
Time commitment:
This position will range from 5-15 hours weekly, depending on whether it’s a lighter week with basic pitching and editing tasks or a week where you’re also working on creating longer term plans for the section and working on bigger projects.
Availability to edit stories at our Woodlawn office or remotely on Monday evenings production is a big plus, though we may be able to work it out if you can’t do Mondays.
Qualifications:
Any experience with reporting, writing, editing, or mentoring is highly recommended.
Any experience with environmental justice, food justice, or gardening is also great!
*If you’re reading this and thinking, ‘Hmm, this would be great if it were only a food editor,’ or ‘Wow I’d love to do this if it were more specifically about environmental justice,’ then LET US KNOW! The title is by no means set in stone, and is more a description of the editor’s interests. The outgoing editor focused on land use, community gardens, and development; you can focus on whatever combination of topics you’d like.
The application asks you to write a sample pitch for this section. Here are some examples of previous pitches:
Soul Shack (Hyde Park)
Rico Nance and his family recently opened Soul Shack on 53rd Street. But in the last year, they’ve also expanded their other East Hyde Park–based restaurants, Mikkey’s and Litehouse, into Avalon Park and South Loop, respectively. Write about Soul Shack’s opening and reach out to Nance to talk about his quickly expanding small restaurant network.
Safe Soils Initiative
Every couple of years, several local papers run a story or two about the dangers of lead in garden soil and how to minimize the risk of soil contamination; they usually counsel sending your soil for soil testing, moving your garden to a lower-lead area, planting in pots—most after-the-fact solutions, some of which may cost you a lot of time and energy. But now, Advocates for Urban Agriculture, UIUC, and the UofI Extension have teamed up to start the Safe Soils Initiative, which will gather data and resources with the aim of building a map of urban soils, identifying heavy metal contamination areas and soil fertility values—the sort of information that will help gardeners grow safely from the get-go. As they build up toward that, they’re looking for gardeners and farmers with active plots to participate in testing. Writer would attend the first informational session on February 19, 6pm, and write a preview of the initiative interviewing project leaders and participants to be published before the second informational session on March 3.