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Senior Reporter — The Examination
Fearless accountability journalism on the global health beat
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The Examination is a start-up nonprofit newsroom telling vital stories on the global public health beat. Launching later this year, we strive to produce fact-based accountability journalism that demands change — and saves lives.
Our beats include tobacco, industrialized food, and polluting industries, which we will be covering in partnership with collaborating journalists around the world.
Job summary
We are seeking an experienced reporter to propose and develop new investigations with high impact potential, and execute them at the highest level by working closely with a multifaceted team.
Our reporting will focus on stories about preventable health crises responsible for human suffering on a staggering scale. Each year, tens of millions of people get sick, or die, from maladies linked to toxic products, poor nutrition, pollution and other health hazards. These often-ignored health disasters are concentrated in poor and marginalized communities that can least bear the cost. The Examination seeks to define, describe and even begin to close this health equity gap.
We will focus the power of accountability journalism on companies and institutions responsible for damaging or failing to protect public health, with an emphasis on under-covered threats that disproportionately harm poor and marginalized communities.
The senior reporter will play a key role in our newsroom’s efforts to produce richly told, meaningful stories and complimentary news products that inform, educate and outrage our audiences. Finding innovative ways to share this vital reporting with the communities most affected by the health crises is also key to the mission.
In this role, this journalist will forge relationships and collaborate with reporters and partnering news outlets around the world. The senior reporter is also expected to guide and mentor other journalists on staff.
Qualifications
The senior reporter should demonstrate through prior experience a keen understanding of how to find new and important stories for a mission-driven news organization, and how to underpin that reporting with empirical findings — through the collection and analysis of data sets, independent research, documents, or other means.
The ideal candidate will have served as a lead reporter on successful investigative stories, and have a passion for ambitious evidenced-based journalism and human storytelling. The senior reporter should have experience reporting on issues related to public health and environmental health and have strong ideas about where to direct coverage and how to engage local partnering journalists on stories with impact potential.
A global outlook is a necessity, as is an openness to collaboration. Past experience working on a reporting team as part of a multi-newsroom collaboration is desired.
Pay and benefits
The estimated salary range for this position is $90,000 to $110,000. The final figure will take into account experience, achievements and location.
The Examination is a fully remote newsroom with excellent health and retirement benefits, a generous vacation and paid leave policy and a commitment to invest in the careers of the journalists on our staff.
We are an equal opportunity employer and have zero tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or any other status protected under applicable law.
People of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and those with experiences in the communities we cover are strongly encouraged to apply.
This job is envisioned as a United States-based position, but if you live elsewhere in the world and feel you are otherwise well-qualified, we welcome you to apply. Please note that the terms of engagement may change depending on the country of residence.
How to apply
Please email work@theexamination.org with your resumé and 3–5 clips of your best work, with a note telling us more about your work on these stories. You might describe how they were first conceived, reporting and writing challenges involved, any impact, etc. Don’t be shy: Your previous work is the most important part of your application.
Please also share your ideas for how you’d tackle the global health beat from an accountability perspective, and how that approach would fit into the mission of The Examination (see below). As part of that, please share at least one story idea, preferably on one of our key beats: tobacco, industrialized food, and polluting industries.
Reporting that makes a difference
The Examination was founded with the understanding that information is a public health necessity, and that there is a critical deficit in information about a wide range of preventable health crises.
Health inequity is a consequence of human action and inaction. Global companies and the people who run them have played a direct role in causing human suffering on an epic scale, through negligence and by design. Governments, in turn, have too often failed to live up to their obligation to protect the health of their citizenry, failures with enormous social and financial repercussions. News organizations in countries and communities facing the worst abuses are often understaffed, undertrained or lacking press freedoms to critique powerful companies and their enablers.
Industries with direct roles in damaging the health of communities will be our primary focus at the outset. The Examination will also explore the ways these entities manipulate rules and regulations to their benefit, market their products and whitewash the harms they cause.
Why we exist: health inequity on a global scale
People in poor communities die younger than those who live in more prosperous ones. They are more likely to drink tainted water, breathe dirty air and live on poisoned land. They are more vulnerable to diseases caused by polluting industries, from plastics to coal to big agriculture. They are more likely to subsist on high-sugar, low-nutrition diets; and they are more likely to be a target of marketing campaigns touting dangerous products.
The toll of this health inequity crisis, in human terms, is immense. Millions die each year from preventable diseases; vast numbers more suffer short and long-term health damage, from cancer to asthma, emphysema, diabetes and other debilitating maladies. Sicknesses linger for years, even decades, weakening families and bankrupting household budgets. At the national level, trillions of dollars that could fund roads or education instead pay for environmental cleanup or caring for the ill.
There is a critical lack of reporting that addresses these crises. Our journalism seeks to fill the information and accountability gap.
Who we are
The Examination will be led by experienced journalists who have seen firsthand the power of investigative reporting to right wrongs and change lives.
We are fully remote, but also aware of the challenges that face a distributed news team. The team will meet in person as often as is feasible and seek to find other ways to build relationships and foster a positive workplace culture.
We need help to meet our ambitious goals and are hiring for positions across our growing virtual newsroom. See all job openings at The Examination here.
