Audience Editor

About Independent Media

Independent Media comprises The Independent, Standard Digital, Bulletin, BuzzFeed UK, HuffPost UK, Tasty UK, Seasoned, IndyBest and indy100.

Harnessing market-leading innovation and excellence across its portfolio of pioneering brands, Independent Media has unrivalled scale, integrity and authority via its sites, apps, video, audio, experiential, newsletters and social media.

While each Independent Media brand speaks in an authentic, unique voice to a loyal and distinct audience, they stand together in their commitment to positivity, inclusivity, and quality journalism and content.

Independent Media’s network reaches 650 million users each month, with 1.1 billion content views across its brands and platforms, including web, apps, social media, podcasts, email, YouTube, syndication partners and print.

The role and the team

The Independent is recruiting an Audience Editor to play an essential role in maintaining and growing our audience across all platforms. You will work alongside editors and reporters across desks to commission, optimise and promote our journalism. This role will demand knowledge and understanding of a plethora of topics from Strictly contestants to the names of key US cabinet members. The successful candidate will have experience in a newsroom managing social media accounts as well as optimising news articles for search and other Google products. In addition, you will need a firm grasp of grammar and journalistic training such as NCTJ or equivalent. This is a role at the heart of the newsroom where quick-thinking and thriving under pressure is essential.

The Independent’s audience team enables millions across the globe to read our wide-ranging and in-depth coverage. Not only that, our team looks to ever grow the size and loyalty of that readership and the engagement around our content on social media platforms. The team is split between our London, New York and Delhi offices.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

• We champion diversity in our teams and in our reporting. As a growing and global brand, we must have a workforce that’s more representative of our readers, viewers, clients and partners, and a workplace that creates a sense of belonging for everyone

• We are committed to hiring and developing a diverse workforce regardless of background, and we support our people to thrive in their careers here.

The Independent is an equal opportunities employer, if you require any reasonable adjustments to complete your application, please do not hesitate to advise us accordingly.

About you

The Independent is looking for a dynamic and experienced audience editor to grow its global reach and help lead changes in editorial strategy and workflow.

As part of the UK audience team, the right candidate will be a highly-organised self-starter, with a deep understanding of how to achieve audience growth across all platforms, as well as being a skilled journalist and wordsmith. They will work on stories across the newsroom and the globe.

We are looking for someone who has a genuine passion for content and how best to achieve audiences on a large scale. You might be a trained journalist with experience in an equivalent organisation, keen to specialise as an audience editor.

You’ll be working in a fast-paced environment where accuracy and creativity are key so the ability to think under pressure is vital.

We are preferably looking for candidates from a journalistic background with newsroom and social media or SEO experience, but will consider someone with excellent social media or SEO skills, a strong interest in news and the ability to learn quickly.

This role will be hybrid remote, spending 3 days per week in our offices in Moorgate.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities

• Monitor news and wires constantly for traffic opportunities

• Recraft headlines to make content pop on and off platform

• Help inform journalistic decisions with audience best practice in mind

• Help to implement social media strategy across all platforms

• Create engaging native content for all social media platforms, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram

• Use analytics platforms to report on performance and spot opportunities

• Suggest stories and subjects for different areas of the site, from news to culture, lifestyle to sport

• Drive the growth of The Independent across social media

• Develop SEO skills under the guidance of other team members

Essential skills and experience

• Strong familiarity with The Independent and our coverage

• Proven track record for increasing followers, engagement and traffic on social media or growth through SEO

• Excellent organisational and planning skills required to manage the daily/weekly/monthly publishing flow of an editorial team.

• Ability to collaborate with editors to grow and increase audience, both on site and across platforms.

• Ability to analyse complex issues and developing actionable insights and plans – using data from proprietary platform analytics (e.g. Facebook) and or third-party aggregate sources (e.g., CrowdTangle).

• Experience using reporting and analytics tools (Google Analytics, Chartbeat) or other tools.

• Skilled content creator.

• Expert knowledge of trends and tools for social media platforms.

• Experience of working in a dynamic fast-paced media environment.

Our values – you will deliver across all our values

Inclusive : We champion diversity in our teams and in our reporting. Working as a team, we put transparency and effective communication at the heart of everything we do.

Innovative: From the very beginning, The Independent has been breaking the mould. We take risks and are always looking to try new ideas in pursuit of excellence.

Independent: Nobody tells us what to think; we make up our own minds and aren’t afraid to do things differently. Like our readers, we value honesty and integrity above outside influences.