Product Manager, Engagement and Crowdsourcing Tools

With a team of more than 100 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. 

Our unique, award-winning engagement reporting team fuels the newsroom’s signature crowdsourced investigations, using everything from callouts and tip lines to citizen-fueled science. Engagement reporters monitor incoming tips and team up with colleagues across the country to gather the evidence and receipts required for impactful, community-driven stories. 

Now we’re looking for a forward-thinking product manager to take charge of the systems behind our work. From supercharging our secure tip lines to coming up with creative strategies for specific crowdsourcing efforts, you’ll help us reach more sources to drive our journalism and stay at the cutting edge of technology.

About the Role

This is a new role in our organization, and we’re looking for someone excited to help us shape it. As product manager, you will be a key member of the engagement reporting team and will be embedded on our expanding product team, where you’ll work alongside engineers, designers and data analysts to build the systems that enable ProPublica to fulfill its mission. 

You’ll also work across the newsroom to help reporters access the most promising tips on their beats, and you’ll amplify our impact by building out our tip-sharing system, making it possible to share leads with local newsroom partners across the country. In all cases, you’ll consider risks and champion best practices to keep our sources and journalists safe. You’ll be encouraged to think outside the box, take initiative, and drive projects from concept to completion using a combination of technical skills and human-centered curiosity.

This role will dual report to the engagement and product teams.

In This Role You Will:

• Ensure the central tip-line system is operating efficiently and securely, both for tipsters and journalists who need to access, review and act on submitted tips. You’ll be the point of contact for reporters who want to check out tips. You’ll explore integrating our tip lines into the company’s larger infrastructure, such as our CMS and newsletter publishing systems, and internal collaboration tools such as Gmail and Slack. You’ll be the person setting our goals, organizing our road map and keeping everyone in the loop.
• Optimize the end-to-end technology strategy that supports our engagement journalism. You’ll own our current suite of crowdsourcing tools, including surveys, Signal communications and our SecureDrop submission platform. This work will require you to directly manage low-code tools like Zapier, Airtable automations, Google Apps scripts and related tools.
• Organize our growing databases of sources and responses to callout forms and build systems that are easy to maintain, use and scale as our needs change.
• Work with your product teammates to experiment, prototype, research and test the tools we use.
• Participate in every-other-week engagement reporting team brainstorms and work closely with engagement reporter teammates on special projects, such as text bots that ping a community when an air monitor detects a pollutant.
• Keep apprised of new approaches, both in the news industry and outside of it, to figure out how we can adapt and innovate. Machine learning to categorize tips? Chatbot helpers? IRL phone booths? Digital intake for physical mail? Whatever you can imagine, we want to hear more!

Qualifications:

Requirements:

• Some experience working in newsrooms — as a journalist, a technologist or in another role — is a must.
• Experience with and understanding of digital security and privacy best practices.
• Experience with reader engagement tools, such as surveys, forums, comments or similar systems. 
• Proficiency with configuring and troubleshooting systems such as Jotform, Airtable and Zapier.
• Comfort with lightweight coding tasks, such as tweaking or debugging HTML, CSS and Javascript, wrangling complex spreadsheet formulas or writing SQL.
• A demonstrated ability to use data and analytics to inform your work.
• Project management experience, with the ability to assess and prioritize needs, develop processes and handle more than one project at a time.
• A track record of taking initiative, communicating clearly and smartly balancing the needs of various stakeholders.
• The ability to follow your curiosity and build solutions using available tools.
• Ability to occasionally travel as necessary for team meetings, sprints or other purposes.

Would be cool if:

• You’ve done creative outreach in a journalistic or marketing capacity. Perhaps you’ve run a Facebook group, built a newsletter list or user-tested an app. Maybe you’ve produced events, canvassed neighborhoods or set up a listening post. Online or off, you had a strategy and you adapted it along the way.
• You’ve got some experience sifting through tips and deciding what’s interesting and what’s not to an accountability-focused investigative newsroom. You’ve used systems such as Hearken, Coral, Screendoor or Subtext.
• You’ve got your eye on the future, including AI or machine learning techniques, the fediverse, encrypted chatbots, in-person experiences … you name it.

We know there are great candidates who may not fit into what we’ve described above or who have important skills we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

This job is full time and includes benefits. (Read more about ProPublica’s benefits.) ProPublica is based in New York City, but remote applicants anywhere in the U.S. are welcome. For those who prefer working in person, we have offices in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Chicago; Phoenix; and Berkeley, California. Applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S.

The expected salary range for this position is $90,000 to $115,000.

This is a good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.

We will begin reviewing applications as we receive them, but we will continue to consider candidates as long as the posting remains live on our site.

Questions? Send an email to talent@propublica.org. No phone calls, please.

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Last updated on Aug 15, 2024