Senior Journalist, Digital News

Job Introduction

The BBC News website is one of the world’s largest and most popular news sites, and this role will put you at the heart of it. We are looking for an enthusiastic and creative senior journalist to join our Digital News team, one of three core teams in our Digital Output department. You will help to produce stories, videos and features on the biggest daily news, bringing in many millions of readers from the UK and around the world.

It’s a job for someone with deep experience in digital news - equally comfortable working on both fast-paced breaking news and the roll-out of planned content.

Main Responsibilities

A Senior Journalist on the Digital News team will be expected to write, edit, sub and commission stories for the BBC News website. The role has many aspects: it could focus on monitoring the news, generating ideas for digital coverage and helping set the daily agenda. It involves writing the biggest news of the day, getting involved with reporting, generating ideas and devising the best formats to tell our biggest stories. An understanding of how search and social trends and audience data improve our journalism will be part of the job. This role will also be called upon to manage the curation and promotion of news on our digital platforms, particularly when on overnight shifts.

Are you the right candidate?

The successful candidate must have:

• Excellent editorial judgement with significant experience editing breaking news in text on digital platforms
• Demonstrable experience of using social media, search and audience data to improve digital storytelling, reach new audiences and broaden coverage
• A track record of covering the UK and international news agenda and delivering insightful, high-quality journalism to digital audiences
• Experience and understanding of the formats, tools, and techniques to run rolling digital news coverage in both text and video
• The ability to very swiftly write and sub engaging news copy for news websites, with attention to accuracy, context and tone
• Experience of making decisions under pressure while swiftly rolling out a digital coverage plan

About the BBC

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours in the document attached below.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here

Package Description

Band: D
Contract type: Permanent and fixed term contracts available
Location: London

Job Application Requirements:

• CV
• Questionnaire with opportunity to detail your experience

You are eligible to apply for an internal role if you are either on a BBC Continuing (Permanent) contract, a BBC Fixed Term contract, a casual contract or freelance contract and you have worked continuously for 6 months.

Any offer of employment with the BBC will be conditional upon you having the right to work in the UK.

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits- We offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.