Rediscover your love for journalism
If you're like many new graduates, you got into journalism because you love to write -- not because you wanted to spend long nights in boring meetings, shooting B-roll video, mixing podcasts, tweeting headlines or managing brands. You like finding and telling stories, especially original, engaging features. And you're afraid you're going to get trapped in some assembly-line job that doesn’t allow you the freedom to create showcase material you need to develop your career.
Don't toil in anonymity for some chain-owned meat grinder that consigns you to technical tasks or forces you to parachute into myriad communities and cover dozens of arcane meetings in 200 words or less. Consider the alternative: community journalism at its finest, as practiced at our internationally known, locally owned, financially secure community weeklies in the Flint Hills of east-central Kansas.
We're seeking an energetic, talented, self-starting storyteller to join our award-winning team of nine full- and part-time journalists. The position may involve occasional sports or meeting coverage but allows ample opportunity to develop original, enterprising journalism, especially human-focused evocative features that touch readers' lives. While we're looking primarily for a reporter, we'll also consider creating a hybrid position that allows you to spend half your week reporting and the other half editing and designing, so you can broaden your experience and figure out which you enjoy most.
Skills with developing ideas from social media are strongly desired. Skills with still photography, editing and page design -- or willingness to learn -- are definite pluses, as are interests in one or more of our special-emphasis, magazine-style topics: agriculture, arts and entertainment, education, health, lifestyle, outdoors, religion, senior living and youth. Rather than being forced to fit into some pre-existing mold, you'll get a chance to try many things, in the process getting in touch with your audience and seeing the impact you have up close and personal.
Along the way, you'll be able to assemble top-notch clips while becoming personally involved in a vibrant rural community. Competing against four-day-a-week dailies, our once-a-week papers won more than 20 statewide awards in each of the past three years, including first place for overall news and writing excellence.
Starting salary of $25,000 is substantially augmented by fully paid, "gold"-level individual health insurance, paid vacation after one year and a year-end profit-sharing bonus. Out-of-state residents may qualify for up to $15,000 in student loan forgiveness and waiver of state income tax for up to five years under a government-administered program.
The community offers very low cost of living, a resort lake on one side of town, a major recreational reservoir on the other, a new performing arts center, a growing artist colony, a new indoor sports and aquatics center, a small church college in one of our communities, a quaint historic library in another, public schools that for three years running have been ranked among the nation's best by Newsweek, plus a host of amenities not normally found in towns its size (population 2,000, county seat for 12,000).
Send your resume and three to five samples of your work to publisher Eric Meyer at eric@marionrecord.com.