Audience Engagement Producer

About the Role

CalMatters and The Markup are hiring an audience engagement producer to manage story distribution across our social media channels, translate our work so it’s as accessible as possible on social platforms, help us find and research the audiences we need to reach, and engage with our audience across all our communication channels. You’ll also answer questions about our reporting, forward story tips to editors, and connect subscribers and members to the right team for any help they need. This is an entry-level position that will be part of our audience team.

Responsibilities

• Translate everything we publish at CalMatters and The Markup to be engaging and as accessible as possible for audiences on different social platforms while maintaining accuracy.
• Write and design custom social media and platform-related cards, featuring key points and takeaways for our audience.
• Schedule posts for all stories, commentaries, products, events, and other links as needed across our social media accounts.
• Directly engage with our audience in a timely way across platforms and when they contact us directly.
• For The Markup’s social accounts, share content that is relevant to real-time tech news twice per week.
• Screen our general inboxes and voicemail for relevant messages to forward onto the relevant teams, and respond to those messages appropriately and in a timely manner.
• Research the different audiences a project or story is serving and how we can best share our journalism with those audiences.

Requirements

• 0-2 years of relevant experience (including internships).
• Familiarity with the major social platforms (Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok) and experience posting to them on a regular basis, whether it’s for personal or professional accounts.
• Strong reading and writing skills, with the ability to identify what’s most important or interesting in a story and translate it into concise, accurate social copy for different audiences.
• Basic experience using design tools like Canva or Figma, which we use to design our social media cards.
• Genuine interest in California news, policy, and technology.
• Ability to manage multiple tasks and deadlines independently in a remote workplace.
• Ability to work collaboratively and proactively, flagging questions or problems early and communicating clearly across a remote team.

Bonus Skills

• Experience in journalism or a journalism school background.
• Familiarity with using social scheduling tools.
• Familiarity with visual design concepts applied to social media.
• Experience editing vertical videos, including with tools like CapCut.

Skills for Growth

This role has a large potential for growth. As you build up your experience, you will have the opportunity to learn skills in the following areas:

• Analyzing our audience and engagement data to identify insights and steps we should take to better help our journalism reach audiences across platforms.
• Researching and evaluating new tools and processes that would make our work better or help us do the same quality work faster.
• Identifying and executing how we can better engage with audiences on social platforms.
• Pitching, writing scripts for, and editing vertical videos about our work.
• Thinking creatively about how our journalism can serve communities and executing on your idea.

Pay

The salary range for this position is $70,000 to $74,263 per year, based on years of relevant experience.

Benefits

• Full-time position with benefits, represented by the Pacific Media Workers Guild.
• Complete benefits package with medical, dental, and vision insurance — we cover 95% of the cost for employees and dependents — from a range of HMO and PPO providers.
• Paid family leave.
• 401(k) program with a match of up to 4% of your salary.
• Life insurance at no cost.

About CalMatters

CalMatters is an award-winning nonprofit, nonpartisan news venture dedicated to explaining the policy and politics of America’s biggest state and the world’s fifth-largest economy. In 2024, we merged with The Markup, a nonprofit national news publication that challenges technology to serve the public good.

• We produce vivid, original multimedia journalism, data-driven news analyses, and watchdog accountability reporting on CalMatters.org and TheMarkup.org, and distribute our work at no cost to more than 250 media partners.
• Our success metric isn’t clicks — it’s impact. CalMatters/The Markup’s work serves millions of people. For example:
  • More than 1 in 5 California voters head to the polls informed by CalMatters’ nonpartisan Voter Guide.
  • Blacklight, our real-time privacy inspector, has been used over 18 million times and helped journalists, nonprofits, and academics hold tech accountable.
  • Digital Democracy, our unprecedented, custom-built AI tool that tracks everything you’d want to know about state legislators, has unearthed stories and prompted legislators to call for change.
• We have the most diverse major newsroom in California. Here you’ll be working alongside dozens of experienced journalists in a supportive, collaborative atmosphere.