Apply Now: KPCC/LAist Senior Producer for Community Engagement
Update: This position has been filled.
For the last three years, I’ve had the privilege to build and lead KPCC/LAist’s award-winning community engagement team. Through our newsroom’s broader engaged journalism, we work to remove barriers for participation and create a welcoming space so that more people have access to the information they need to be their own best advocates.
At KPCC/LAist, that looks like:
- community-centered storytelling shows
- participatory photo projects
- coverage areas rooted in information needs
- thousands and thousands of Angelenos’ questions answered.
In this role, I’ve also developed a year-round paid internship program designed to give students and recent graduates the opportunity to gain experience in one of the country’s biggest public media newsrooms, learn through a series of staff-led workshops, and build relationships.
It’s hard work, and it’s so worth it.
KPCC/LAist is committed to engaged journalism. We’ve built a team to prove it, and this year we created a vice president position dedicated to community engagement and strategic initiatives.
As I move into this new role, we are looking for a senior producer to help lead, support, and champion our amazing team of engagement producers and to oversee the expanded internship program.
You can read the full job description here.
I could name a hundred reasons why I think this is an awesome job, but here I’ll take a moment to name just five really good ones.
The Team
Smart. Thoughtful. Funny. Caring. Inventive. Disruptive. The engagement team here is made up of incredible humans, and I look forward to our weekly team meetings and annual PowerPoint parties with an enthusiasm I can’t totally explain. (We’re also not bad at escape rooms.) These are journalists who have centered community information needs and habits in everything they do and who understand that meaningful engagement requires an unwavering commitment to empathy.
The Playground
When you have a chief content officer who regularly throws out the idea of sky writing as a distribution model, it’s a clear and welcome sign that you’ve entered into a space for creative and big thinking.
I often think of the KPCC/LAist newsroom as an innovation lab for engaged journalism, and I’ve marveled at the inventive nature of those who work here: We’ve sent thousands of fold-out fliers to parents, stocked libraries with bookmarks, stationed ourselves at swap meets and health fairs, presented sold-out community-driven storytelling shows, and redesigned entire beats based on deep listening.
And through our Medium page, we’re also working to share what we’ve learned with the growing field of practice.
The Transformation
Growing up mixed in a mostly white town, I rarely felt seen or heard in the local paper or broadcast news. Through engagement — and especially on this team — we’re working to make our journalism more welcoming, reflective, and inclusive. That has included the co-creation of Unheard LA, work to diversify our sourcing for stories and events, and the overhauling of our internal (soon-to-be-public) style guide.
While there are many in newsrooms who are trying to get editor and senior leadership buy-in with engagement or to move the practice out of a silo, the editorial leaders at KPCC/LAist embrace engaged journalism. That means this work is expected throughout the newsroom, not just on one team, from requiring individual mission statements from our journalists to investing in human-centered design across beats.
The Interns
It’s absolutely rewarding to be a part of journalists’ earliest experiences in newsrooms, and at KPCC/LAist we’ve had the fortune to work with knock-your-socks-off talented interns over the years. Among our staff you’ll find many former interns — working as reporters, producers, broadcast managers, underwriting coordinators, and more. As senior producer for community engagement, you’ll be a part of identifying, hiring, and supporting students and recent graduates. It’s yet another opportunity to live out our commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The People
Yes, I’ve already gushed over the team. And they deserve the praise. But so do the people who make up every department in this organization. As senior producer, you have the opportunity to collaborate not only with L.A.’s best journalists but also with the dedicated, mission-driven folks who make up the membership, institutional giving, operations, human resources, on-demand, finance, and events teams.
Please make sure to check out the full job posting here. This is also a good opportunity to let you know I love a strong cover letter: This is your time to assert your passion, not your privilege.
And you can always check out more of work here on Medium and at LAist.com. You don’t want to miss Child Care, Unfiltered!
