UPDATE: We’ve filled the position, but may be hiring more soon.
If this looks like your dream job, please send an email anyway. 🙂
Cross-posted from our new team blog:
We’re looking for a great hacker to join our team at the Chicago Tribune.
Requirements:
- A passion for the news
- An understanding of the inner workings of the web
- Attention to detail and hatred for inaccuracy
- A genuine and friendly disposition
And, of course…
- Bad-ass programming skills and a love for the craft of making software
Tools we use (and thus, tools we hope you might know a thing or two about — if you don’t, that’s okay, but please explain yourself):
- HTML/CSS
- Python
- Django
- PostgreSQL
- PostGIS
- Ubuntu Linux + Amazon EC2
Our team is composed of generalists: We all write GUI code, mine data and manage servers. You ought to be equally comfortable wearing many hats. That said, we’ve all got our specialities, and would love to find a team member with a superpower which none of us already possess. Something like…
- Data science (statistics, exploratory data analysis, R)
- Information design (beautiful charts, graphs and other Tufte-geekery)
- Maintaining high-performance web sites (cuz we’re gonna get serious traffic)
- Building and gardening social media or crowdsourcing applications
You’ll work closely with reporters on the investigative and city desks, helping them research and present their work. Sometimes you’ll be screen scraping, mucking with data, visualizing and exploring information, and seeking truth. Other days, we’ll huddle and sketch with reporters, imagining ways to present information and tell stories on the web.
Sometimes we’ll knock out an application in a day, other times it’ll take a few weeks. Either way, we work fast and lean, relying heavily on frameworks, and following agile best practices. It’s fun.
Things we’ve built lately:
- City Council’s $3.7 million allowance: How aldermen spent taxpayer money
- Dry cleaners’ toxic legacy: Find sites near you
- Burr Oak Cemetery: Browse the headstones
- Clout goes to college: Find how your school ranks
Folks you’ll work with:
Gear you’ll get:
- One shiny, new MacBook Pro
- One CDM (Cheap Dell Monitor)
- One comfy Aeron chair
- …all at a desk somewhere in the Tribune newsroom, where you’ll be surrounded by reporters arguing with the cops, yelling about the ball game, telling crazy stories, and otherwise practicing their trade.
There is no free pop, pinball or posh cafeteria.
But, you’ll like what you do. You’ll come to work energized, and leave satisfied that you’ve done something that will make your mom proud. You’ll have held our government accountable, spoken truth to power, given voice to the voiceless, and contributed to the public good.
Beat that, Google.
Interested? Email your info to newsapps@tribune.com. Thanks!
hacker journalist 