Sports Reporter

Cleveland.com's award-winning sports team has an opening for an aggressive, analytically minded multimedia reporter to cover the Cleveland Cavaliers.

We seek someone who can cover the Cavs with a smart and critical eye and give fans in-depth, thoughtful coverage they can't find anywhere else. When the team has successes or failures, your mission will be to provide fans the answer to the questions "why?" "what if?" and "what's next?"

This new position will serve as the second person on a two-reporter team. Half of the focus will be serving as the host personality and creative engine of cleveland.com's Cavs podcast, making it as informative and entertaining as possible; and growing audience by taking it from the current one day a week to five. This reporter will cover all home games, and some road games as needed. In addition to the podcast, this reporter will produce features, columns, analysis, analytics-based reporting and breaking news coverage as the occasion dictates, working in tandem with the other beat reporter.

Education, Experience And Skills

Minimum of 1 - 2 years of journalism experience with a proven ability in reporting (print and electronic) and writing
Experience delivering engaging and informative content from in front of a camera and/or behind a microphone
Proven experience building, maintaining and engaging an active audience
Ability to work under deadline pressure and prioritize tasks appropriately
Solid understanding of news writing, journalistic ethics and story structure
Experience with search engine optimization practices
Experience taking photos, recording audio and video with ability to edit
Experience with using social media to source and promote content a plus
Basic HTML or equivalent web language a plus
Demonstrated capability in capitalizing on high-value topics by engaging audiences in frequency and urgency
Understanding imperatives of reaching audiences on multiple platforms
Skills in social media and digital interaction
Proven ability to utilize a broad set of tools to tell stories and engage the audience
Keeps abreast of industry advances and aggressively considers new methods of reaching audiences including engaging, interactive and optimized product offerings

Duties/Responsibilities

Gather information and produce journalistically sound news elements for use in all media platforms, existing and future, that are:

Balanced and factual
Timely and topical
Well-sourced and contextually correct

Coverage Also Will Include

Frequent, incremental posting throughout the day
Story aggregation and topical link-posting
Monitoring and engaging in reader comment streams on Local Market Website impact pages
Elevating comments into new posts when appropriate
Interacting on social media platforms, with story shares, objective commentary, and promoting the news organization's content initiatives
Understanding and employing the means for monitoring audience interest and competitors' posting on your topic, including setting up Google alerts, Twitter and RSS feeds
Taking photographs and short video, and posting it to the web as well as uploading to any internal production systems
Using laptops and smartphones for remote web reporting
Using the Arc content management systems, and any future CMS
Other duties as assigned
This job requires reliable transportation to meet with sources or cover events.