Evening Post Publishing Newspaper Group is hiring: Rising Waters Reporter in Cha

The Post and Courier, the premier news source for South Carolina, is seeking an energetic, driven reporter to join our award-winning Rising Waters Lab.

The Rising Waters team, composed of two reporters and an editor, focuses primarily on mounting threats from rising seawater and other climate-driven impacts along coastal South Carolina, with a particular emphasis on Charleston and the Lowcountry. The team also reports news from other regions in the state as needed.

Our coverage is ambitious and is deeply connected to the people whose lives are being shaped in immediate and long-term ways by climate change. Flooding, hurricanes and other threats are becoming a more common and a grave concern for coastal residents and inland residents, too, as we saw in 2024 with the deadly march of Helene across the Carolinas.

Our Rising Waters coverage has included stories on the tensions over development vs. preservation in fast-growing South Carolina, vanishing and threatened marshes (and the impact on coastal resilience), and increasingly flood-prone communities and river-systems. In 2021, we sent a reporting team to Greenland to explore the impact of melting glaciers on SCs coastal flooding. And in 2023, we dispatched a team to African to document how seasonal dust from Saharan storms affects our hurricanes.

If you are creative with ideas on a beat, write powerfully and know how to translate science into stories that dont bore, then you have the starting point for what were seeking in this role. You must be able to produce a steady flow of quick-turn enterprise stories, with daily coverage of in-the-moment news when needed, and be able to work with your team to develop longer-range projects that we work on over time. We want high-impact stories and value ambitious journalism. But the primary focus of the job is on quicker enterprise.

Day-to-day reporting duties include writing stories about flooding, infrastructure challenges, resiliency and sustainability and their obstacles, green architecture and design, habitat loss, impacts on endangered species, and conservation efforts. As noted, stories should emphasize human experiences, showing the connections between climate change and the way people live.

We look for journalists who bring passion to their work and are easy to work with team players who are eager to collaborate. You should know that metrics matter in a journalists work. You must embrace the importance of creating high-quality content that attracts, grows and retains a digital audience.

The Rising Waters Lab is funded through our Public Service and Investigative fund, a nonprofit arm of The Post and Courier that is supported by donations from readers and large and small endowments funds.

If youre hired, you will join an ambitious, Pulitzer Prize-winning environment where talented journalists have the opportunity to pursue the best work of their careers, limited only by their ambition and determination.

The Post and Courier is privately held and is investing in journalism. We began expanding across the state in 2020, seeking to fill a void in news deserts or areas where local news coverage had withered. We are anchored in scenic Charleston but now operate Post and Courier newsrooms in multiple South Carolina cities.

We are a passionate, dedicated, digital-driven organization and seek someone who shares that journalistic passion and commitment to excellence.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Digital skills: Must work effectively in a digital-focused news operation, with an emphasis on compelling content and clear grasp of SEO tactics and eagerness to promote work in social platforms and off platform.
• Accuracy and ethics: Produce work that is accurate and fair. Understands libel and privacy issues.
• Communication: Works well with editors and reporters across disciplines. Discusses original and assigned story ideas. Participates in brainstorming sessions to develop detailed and realistic story ideas.
• Organizational skills: Develops a systematic approach to managing a beat and meet deadlines.
• Creative mindset: Develops smart, engaging story ideas and varied approaches to telling stories outside of narrative or explanatory storytelling.
• Flexibility: Reacts to change productively and handles other duties as assigned.

Requirements, minimum education level, and experience:

• Bachelors degree in Journalism or another field if you have journalism experience
• At least 2 years of full-time newsroom experience (significant journalism fellowship or internship experience counts)
• A track record of producing exemplary journalism
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills associated with developing effective working relationships
• Strong prioritization skills with excellent follow-through
• High-level reporting and writing skills