Partnership and Engagement Associate

We are no longer accepting applications for this position.

One of the guiding principles of The Marshall Project is to share and distribute our work widely — both to ensure a broad audience for our investigations, and to bring our expertise, data, and sources to journalists across the country.

To deepen and expand these efforts, The Marshall Project is creating an innovative new position — a partnership and engagement associate — who will coordinate with our newsroom to adapt our work for local distribution. They will also take the lead in building a robust network of partners across print, digital, radio and television outlets.

The right candidate for this position might be someone with a communications background who is an expert in promoting stories, or who can deploy engagement techniques to better understand different audiences and their needs, or someone who has experience in local television production and understands how to localize our stories for that market.

The right candidate will be eager to serve a unique audience: local criminal justice reporters and editors. In this role, you will be tasked with meeting the information needs of the reporters who cover the criminal justice system at the local level. You will develop best practices for adapting The Marshall Project’s national investigations into story guides that provide actionable steps for reporters to follow. And you will experiment with how different formats and avenues for distribution can reach the widest and most diverse network of local partners.

On the partnership side, you will be a motivated self-starter who is organized and creative, adept at forging new relationships with local media and communicating our work to them. You’ll host listening sessions to answer questions about our work, track its impact and share those findings both locally and internally.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Coordinate the distribution of our work across a network of local outlets, creating new partnerships with print, digital, radio and television.
In collaboration with Marshall Project reporters and editors, create templates and “how-to” guides that explain how our work can be used on the local level.
Maintain a local story database and create a tracking system so we can see where our work has led to local reporting, as well as the impact of those stories.
Conduct ongoing user research to improve functionality / new feature development.
Host story-focused information sessions for local reporters. These will primarily be online, but in-person events could also be produced on a case-by-case basis.
Manage communication with local reporters, either directly or via newsletters or SMS groups.
Vet and develop story sources for local broadcast and radio stories in collaboration with the engagement team.

You’ll also:

Work closely with our partnership team to deepen and broaden our media relationships.
Manage a local reporting network database, ensuring that stakeholders are sharing information about the projects selected for this initiative.
Strategize with newsroom managers and audience teams to expand how our work can be localized and shared.
Maintain internal documentation and training materials in our CMS.
Collaborate with our development team to aid their work in expanding and extending this initiative.

What we’re looking for:

Experience working in a newsroom as a partnership or production associate, or as an engagement reporter.
A background in communications or editorial pitching, and the ability to envision how stories can be told across different mediums.
Experience managing or producing editorial projects, especially those involving multiple media partners.
Familiarity with Trello, and/or experience working in digital content management systems.
Ideas for how newsrooms can improve communication and collaboration across teams.

Some examples of what your work might look like:

Working with the team that created our state-by-state database for books banned in prisons, you will create guidance for local reporters, and organize online training on how our database can be mined for information and used in local reporting.
Create a database and network of local reporters and editors working across print, broadcast and radio, and in digital newsrooms, to whom you will regularly send our guides and analysis.
Develop a local reporting toolkit that teaches state-level reporters how to use our analysis of the FBI crime data in their own stories.
Help develop a guide for local reporters to examine the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on the criminalization of reproductive rights at the local level

We do not expect every candidate to be equally skilled in all these areas, and this is not a complete list of all relevant qualifications applicants might bring to the job. Please tell us about your other assets not mentioned here that may be valuable to this role. Reaching talent across a range of backgrounds and experiences is deeply important to us. If you do not have the exact combination of skills listed here, but are still interested in this role and/or in The Marshall Project, we'd love to hear from you.

Who You’d Be Working With

Ruth Baldwin, our Editorial Director and your manager
Nicole Lewis, our Engagement Editor
David Eads, our Data Editor
Nicole Funaro, our communications associate
As well as many of our talented and resourceful reporters.

Our headquarters are in New York City, but we are happy to consider remote candidates who live in the United States.

Who We Are

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system. We have won two Pulitzer Prizes: in 2021 for national reporting and in 2016 for explanatory journalism; we were also a Pulitzer finalist for investigative reporting. We are not advocates—we follow the facts and we do not pander to any audience—but we have a declared mission: to create and sustain a sense of urgency about the criminal justice system. We do not generally cover breaking news (although we curate the reporting of other news outlets in our morning newsletter). Our work includes investigative and explanatory projects and shorter pieces aimed at highlighting stories that other news organizations miss, underestimate or misunderstand. To assure our work reaches a larger audience we partner or co-publish with other media outlets on almost all of our work; we have partnered with more than 100 newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and online sites.

We are an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity. We welcome qualified applicants of all races, ethnicities, physical abilities, genders and sexual orientations, including people who have been incarcerated or otherwise involved with the criminal justice system.

Compensation and Benefits

This job is full-time, with a competitive salary and benefits, including:

Annual Salary Range: $75,000 - $90,000

100% employer-paid and employer-contributed medical, vision and dental insurance options, matching traditional and Roth 401k (immediate vesting), and 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

Voluntary benefits include: Health and Dependent Care FSA, commuter benefits, pet insurance, short and long-term disability insurance, employee and dependent life insurance, AFLAC accident, hospital indemnity and critical illness coverage, legal benefits, personal excess liability insurance, and employee discount marketplace.

Employees receive 15 days of paid time off, plus two personal days. The Marshall Project office is closed between Dec. 24 and Jan 2.

How to Apply

To apply, use this form to send a cover letter and resume. Please submit a cover letter that gives examples of how you facilitated team-building or partnerships in your work, and other examples where you have taken the lead with problem-solving. Feel free to use bullet points for brevity.

Due to the expected volume of applications, we will follow up with the most promising candidates, but cannot respond individually to all applicants. Please know it usually takes us more than a month to review applications.

The deadline to submit an application is 11:59 p.m. Eastern on January 5, 2023.

Candidate office hours:

In order to help candidates prepare a complete and comprehensive application, we are making our team available for office hours several times during this hiring period. Please bring all questions to one of the following anonymous webinars.

In order to create a consistent and equitable experience, we encourage all candidates with specific questions about the role or the application process to register for a webinar and attend in order to ask your question.