High School Sports Reporter

About the role

Cleveland.com's award-winning sports team is seeking an ambitious, social media-savvy reporter to cover high school sports. This role offers the opportunity to break news, tell impactful stories, and help shape the future of high school sports coverage across multiple platforms. The ideal candidate will be a reporter, digital storyteller, and community builder with experience delivering engaging content in both written and video formats. You will join a three-person high school sports team covering one of the most passionate high school sports markets in the nation.

Responsibilities

• Gather information and produce journalistically sound news elements for all media platforms, ensuring content is balanced, factual, timely, topical, well-sourced, and contextually correct.
• Cover high school sports, including game coverage and feature stories on key people and trends, with a focus on providing context and presenting content across platforms.
• Use reporting and AI-assisted tools to produce exclusive content, such as breaking news, recruiting updates, investigations, trend stories, video explainers, and social-first reporting.
• Interact on social media platforms through story shares, objective commentary, and promotion of the news organization’s content initiatives.
• Use social listening, analytics, and audience-monitoring tools to identify trends, conversations, and story opportunities.
• Capture and edit photos, audio, and video, posting them to the web and uploading to internal production systems.
• Use laptops and smartphones for remote web reporting.
• Work with the Arc content management system (CMS) and adapt to future CMS platforms.
• Post frequent, incremental updates throughout the day.
• Curate and contextualize relevant news and developments within the high school sports landscape.
• Monitor and engage with reader comments on stories, elevating comments into new posts when appropriate.
• Build meaningful relationships with coaches, athletes, administrators, and fans.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• A degree in journalism, communications, or a related field, or equivalent education and experience.
• At least three years of professional journalism experience with a demonstrated ability to produce clear, compelling, and accurate reporting.
• Ability to work under deadline pressure and prioritize tasks effectively.
• Solid understanding of news writing, journalistic ethics, and story structure.
• Experience with search engine optimization (SEO) practices.
• Experience capturing and editing photos, audio, and video content.
• Experience using social media to source, distribute, and promote content.
• Basic knowledge of HTML or equivalent web languages.
• Demonstrated ability to reach audiences on multiple platforms.
• Skills in social media and digital interaction.
• Proven ability to utilize a broad set of tools to tell stories and engage audiences.
• Reliable transportation to meet with sources and cover events.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $55,000 - $63,000 per year.