Staff Journalist, Systems Desk
BlackLeaf explains the systems everyone relies on and nobody can see — budgets, benefits, insurance, infrastructure — end to end, in money terms and labor terms. We are hiring a staff journalist to follow public dollars through those systems and draw what they find. Every number in a BlackLeaf story traces to a named primary source; the chart is the story, and the prose is spartan. You will publish under the house bylines, and your work will be annotated in place by vetted experts and argued with in an open comment section on every piece. That is the point.
What you'll do
- Report and write data-driven explainers on one public system at a time: where its money comes from, where it goes, and who does the work.
- Verify every figure against primary documents — agency data, trustee reports, filings, auction results, court records — and cite them in-line, in the sentence where the number appears.
- Build the article's dataset with per-figure source citations, and compose its charts (money-flow sankeys, cost comparisons, staffing counts) in the house visualization system.
- Close each piece with an annotated source bibliography a reader can audit.
- Engage with reader comments and expert annotations on your pieces; corrections are made in the open.
- Ship on a regular cadence; one thoroughly verified piece beats three soft ones.
What you'll need
- 3+ years of reporting experience, or equivalent demonstrated work following money through public records.
- A portfolio showing primary-source reporting: budgets, financial filings, actuarial or regulatory documents, FOIA responses.
- Working comfort with spreadsheets and structured data; you can find, clean, and sanity-check a dataset yourself.
- Clear, compressed prose. We publish concise, minimalist, spartan copy with no hot takes and no jargon.
- Sound judgment about uncertainty: when a number can't be verified, you cut it or say so plainly.
Nice to have
- Experience with public-records requests (FOIA and state equivalents).
- SQL, Python, or R for data work; familiarity with d3 or similar charting.
- A beat history in any system we cover: entitlements, insurance, energy, education finance, labor, municipal finance.
The listed range is the annual base salary for this role; placement depends on experience. BlackLeaf is an equal opportunity employer and considers all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic.