Explainer-driven news outlet Vox is building a team that can identify and clean up data sets to be used as renewable resources for story ideas.
A Vox job posting on Greenhouse shows there are at least four new positions on the market — ranging from news apps developer to data journalism fellow — for a nascent data team.
The other positions listed are a news graphic designer with experience in programming and a visual reporter who can tell stories “with charts and maps and photos” in addition to words.
In a post on Vox Wednesday, co-founder Melissa Bell outlined the outlet’s goal for the team. Her nine-point plan emphasizes working with “relevant and useful data,” “building data sets,” clarifying mistakes clearly and curating infographics and visualizations.
We hope to make as many as possible public, so that they can be used by journalists and non-journalists outside Vox’s walls. We’ll collaborate with the whole team to tell stories in all different formats: interactives, written stories, videos – and, yes, likely a chart or two hundred. But above all, we want to use them to find stories that would otherwise be unseen, or ignored — we want our data journalism to simply be great journalism.
Earlier in the day, Vox announced that Twitter data editor Simon Rogers would be a contributing editor for the outlet, in charge of developing “data journalism and visualization tools.” Rogers, who founded The Guardian’s data blog, will continue to work for Twitter.
Vox’s push into data comes months after the outlet’s parent company, Vox Media, raised $46.5 million in a funding round led by General Atlantic. Vox previously told Poynter it was planning to hire political reporters in advance of the 2016 presidential election.
