Editor in Chief, Chicago Public Media

The Opportunity

WBEZ is looking for an outstanding Editor-in-Chief to lead a new era of journalistic impact and innovation in the Chicago region.

The Editor in Chief will be our single leader intently concerned about what our coverage needs to be today, this week, this month, and in the future. The Editor-in-Chief oversees the overall editorial direction, content strategy, and standards to ensure journalistic integrity across multiple platforms, including digital, broadcast, print and social media .  This role combines leadership, creative vision, and managerial skills to ensure high-quality content delivery to meet the needs of our diverse audience and to drive audience engagement.

We’re looking for a big-picture thinker who is skilled at defining and articulating a compelling vision for editorial impact and public service journalism in the Chicago region. Our Editor in Chief will translate an editorial vision and strategy into clear objectives, structures and workflows that create effective outcomes.

General Responsibilities

The Editor in Chief will take responsibility for our editorial team during a critical moment. This involves integration of the WBEZ and Sun-Times newsrooms, including completing a large  reorg, putting people in the right roles, creating news processes, workflows and training needed to make it work, troubleshooting and making adjustments as needed. Other key responsibilities:

Editorial Strategy & Planning

• Drive the daily news agenda in Chicago, helping journalists and residents consistently advance the public conversation with depth, context and understanding
• Translate an editorial vision and strategy into clear objectives, systems, structures, and workflows that help staff do their work effectively and sustainably
• Establish content themes, calendars, and long-term goals.
• Ensure content aligns with audience needs, industry trends, and brand objectives.

Content Oversight

• Push a strong, daily editorial theory that the entire newsroom understands regarding our editorial priorities.
• Clearly define goals and success metrics and hold all members of the team accountable for results and impact
• Oversee the creation, editing, and publishing of content across all platforms.
• Maintain high journalistic standards, ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines.
• Foster an environment that supports outstanding audio reporting and programming by embracing techniques, workflows and standards that ensure excellence & timeliness

Team Leadership

• Build the highest performing team we can, including developing and managing our staff, clearly setting expectations and feedback mechanisms to ensure employees  know where they stand regarding performance. This includes cultivating new skills on the team by training, hiring and investing where needed.
• Foster a collaborative and productive work environment where employees can be their authentic selves and show up to do their best work.
• Have the ability to recruit, hire and retain outstanding talent, including a passion for creating pathways for continuous learning and professional development among staff
• Be an influential leader with the ability to inspire the team to achieve ambitious results while also driving accountability
• Demonstrate a commitment to, and a track record of accomplishment in, advancing the work of diversity, equity, inclusion as a leaderHave experience successfully leading in a union context.
• Explore a variety of platforms with the intent to develop relationships with talent we could potentially hire, reaching out to national talent to make a play, and, when necessary, recognizing when to cut ties. 
• Strategically prioritize staff’s work among our many competing initiatives to ensure we’re focusing our resources where they can be most impactful.
• Center our mission of informing all Chicagoans to support a better region in everything we do. 

Collaboration & Communication

• Help instill a collaborative culture of innovation, inclusion and transparency that set employees up for success and creates an environment where everyone can contribute their best ideas and work.
• Build relationships with contributors, freelancers, and industry experts. 
• Oversee the development of fostering much deeper ties to our community and work with leadership to determine the best ways for Chicago Public Media to reclaim the conversation and convening journalism ceded to social media platforms. 
• Find ways to foster a deeper connection to our city and region, and the need to adjust our journalism accordingly.
• Be the executive partner across the entire organization to editorial – from exploring AI solutions for the newsroom; alerting marketing and membership of our biggest investigative work and ensuring we’re firing up all the engines; working with our analytics and revenue teams to set hard goals for our editors and holding them to account if we’re not seeing improvements every quarter.

Content Performance & Analytics

• Monitor audience engagement, web traffic, and content performance metrics.
• Use data insights to refine editorial strategies and improve content quality.
• Work closely with: our analytics team to understand what our different audiences need;, our business and finance teams to understand what we can support; and the platform leaders to determine what we need to cover, why, where and how. 
• Lead definitive, unique coverage of the most important topics in Chicago, and push our teams when we’re not living up to our competitors (which is everyone plus bots). 

Budget & Resource Management

• Oversee the editorial budget, allocating resources effectively.
• Manage contracts with freelance writers, photographers, and vendors.

Crisis Management & Legal Compliance

• Address content-related issues, corrections, or disputes.
• Ensure all published material adheres to legal and ethical standards.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate will have the following professional and personal qualities, skills and experience:

• 20+ years as a leader in a highly accomplished, multi-platform newsroom (mid- to large- sized newsroom – 50+ people).
• Outstanding news judgment and a significant record of accomplishment in leading journalists to produce work of tremendous distinction and community impact.
• Significant digital editorial leadership experience.
• Excellent writing, editing, communication and organizational skills.
• Skilled at juggling a variety of daily tasks with ease and precision, with a demonstrated expertise in effective project management.
• Experience driving and measuring journalistic impact using a variety of qualitative and quantitative metrics to chart progress and to make informed decisions.
• Strong relationship builder, coach and naturally collaborative leader with experience building successful partnerships within and beyond the organization. 

Education

BA Degree or equivalent 

Compensation

The expected pay range for this position is $210,000 to $260,000 per ANNUM.

Chicago Public Media provides pay ranges representing its good faith estimate of what the organization reasonably expects to pay for a position.  The pay offered to a selected candidate will be determined based on factors such as (but not limited to the scope and responsibilities of the position, the qualifications of the selected candidate, departmental budget availability, internal equity, geographical location, and external market pay for comparable jobs.