The Chicago Tribune Data Visualization team is looking for a senior news applications developer. We are Chicagoland’s dominant news organization, a fast-moving and vital place to do journalism.
We are focused on using data to tell the most important Chicago stories. Our group reports, analyzes, conceptualizes and builds news applications, maps, charts and diagrams. We study our users and develop stories that fit our newsroom’s mission to stand up for the community, share the Chicago experience and help people navigate their daily lives. We play a dual role, mostly developing stories of our own, but also supporting the best stories from the newsroom.
As a team member, we would look to you to be an idea machine, to work on your own and with the Tribune’s best reporters, develop data sources and find stories. Our ideal candidate can take ideas and carry them through to completion, collaborating as needed to make sure the information is clear, the presentation is top notch and the distribution/promotion is far-reaching.
You’ll work with our versatile visual team to use and develop new story forms and tools. You’ll be instrumental in developing one of the best news platforms in Chicago and the Midwest.
Our newsroom offers a competitive salary and benefits, flexible schedule, a newsroom and management team interested in digital storytelling and creative freedom to explore the stories most important to our audience.
- Sincere curiosity. Above all things.
- “Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.” One of the best things about developing in the newsroom is that you’ll be using code to quickly solve a diverse set of problems. You should be hungry to learn new tools and strategies and share them with the group. Many news application developers have come to coding without a formal computer science background. This is great and we value the perspective that people bring from other disciplines, but you should be eager to learn some software engineering concepts and adopt disciplined methods as part of your practice.
- We want our newsroom to look more like the city that we serve. If you’re a person from a group that’s underrepresented in engineering or journalism, we really want to see your application! Most of our utility libraries, data processing pipelines, publishing tools and web applications are written in Python, so familiarity with that is important. If you’re more fluent in another multi-paradigm language such as Ruby or R, that’s ok too, but you should be willing to pick up Python. Familiarity with Python web frameworks such as Django or Flask is very valued.
- On the frontend, you should be strong in writing semantic HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. You should have some familiarity with CSS preprocessors (we use Sass). You should be familiar with the libraries we use for visualization such as d3 and Leaflet. You should also be comfortable with utility libraries such as jQuery and Underscore but be able to write code using pure JavaScript. Familiarity with JavaScript application frameworks such as Backbone or React (a framework we've recently come to like) is a huge plus. We’ve been experimenting with ES2015, npm, Browserify and Gulp. If you have any experience with or interest in those tools, we’d love to learn along with you.
- We use git for source code management. You will too. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be open to it being your new best friend.
- For better or worse, we do our own devops. Familiarity with shell scripting and *nix sysadmin tasks would be great. We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) so we’d prefer some familiarity with that platform. We also like familiarity with scripted deployment (we use Fabric).
- You should have an open-source mentality, thinking about how to build projects as sets of reusable components. Participation in open source software projects, whether its pull requests, opening issues or answering questions on StackOverflow is something we like a lot.
- Other tools/technologies we use frequently:
- Relational databases and SQL (Postgres)
- NoSQL databases, to a lesser extent (MongoDB, Redis)
- Tarbell, a Flask-based static site builder, originally developed in our newsroom
- GIS - QGIS, ArcGIS, ogr2ogr
- A large, diverse audience is key to our success, and any skills or experience in this are is a big plus. Mainstream social media channels are vital, but we're always looking for new and exciting ways to capture the attention of more people.
Contact data editor Jonathon Berlin, [email protected], or 312-222-3508
To apply for this position, visit the posting on the Tribune Publishing careers site.