Business and Innovation Reporter-Editor
Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Education Week, the independent, "go to" source of news and information on K-12 education, is seeking an enterprising, business-savvy journalist to help incubate and launch a new line of coverage on the burgeoning "education industry" and rapidly emerging public and private efforts to foster educational innovation.

Almost no other area of American education is undergoing as much ferment, with an explosion of investment in startup ventures, reconfigurations of established players, and major commitments by philanthropies to the development and scaling up of new approaches to instruction, learning, and school structure.

This job offers an entrepreneurially minded reporter-editor the chance to grow professionally while working with Education Week’s senior team on new, primarily digital, journalistic and informational products that chronicle, analyze, and aggregate developments in K-12 business and innovation. The new “education ventures” franchise aims to serve current readers in educational leadership, policy, and research positions and to attract new audiences of education entrepreneurs, private-equity investors, corporate executives, business analysts, and social venture philanthropists, among others.

Responsibilities: The business and innovation reporter-editor will, among other evolving duties, have a lead role in crafting, refining, and implementing plans for this expanded area of coverage. He/she will help conceive, launch, and manage a Web “channel” for original and aggregated news and information on Education Week’s edweek.org site, inaugurate a news blog on education business and innovation topics, write related print and online articles, devise plans for using social media in reporting and disseminating news, and help plan and conduct live and virtual events. He/she will be part of a thriving Education Week newsroom whose authoritative reporting, in print and on edweek.org, sets the national standard for coverage of precollegiate education.

Qualifications: An applicant for this job must be conversant with business, finance, and markets and should have at least three years of related experience as a writer, editor, or analyst in a news or information organization. He/she must be able to track and interpret developments across a range of enterprises, from entrepreneurial startups to major publicly traded companies, and be skilled at reading financial statements, annual reports, and other business documents. He/she should also have a good grasp of the forces, such as the rise of digital technology, that are causing change and driving innovation in the 21st century. Experience covering K-12 education or the education industry is not required, but an applicant must be committed to applying his/her knowledge of business and innovation to this vitally important sector of society. He/she must have excellent reporting and writing skills and an enthusiasm for using blogs, social media, and other online and digital tools available to 21st-century journalists.    

Salary is commensurate with experience and comes with a generous benefits package.

About Education Week: Published by the forward-thinking nonprofit corporation Editorial Projects in Education, Education Week spans multiple platforms, including a print edition (with a subscriber base of nearly 50,000 and a “pass-along” readership of more than 260,000 others), a well-established online presence at edweek.org  (with more than 1 million registrants and about 500,000 unique visitors a month), a daily e-newsletter (with some 225,000 subscribers), other specialized e-newsletters and reports, live and virtual events, and social media. It offers a congenial workplace located in Bethesda, Md., a vibrant suburb just outside Washington, D.C., within walking distance of the Metro subway system.

TO APPLY: Send cover letter, resume, and work samples to bizsearch@epe.org, or to Gregory Chronister, Executive Editor, Education Week, 6935 Arlington Rd., Bethesda, MD 20814. EOE