The American Journalism Project is seeking a Senior Vice President, Startup Studio, to lead our team of incubation specialists in launching ambitious, impactful, and sustainable nonprofit local news organizations around the country.

The SVP, Startup Studio, will play a critical role in enabling the next wave of the nation’s largest local news startups by helping to hire, onboard, and support founding leadership teams as they launch new organizations. The SVP will ensure the success of new startups by establishing the foundational infrastructure for growth and impact.

Leading AJP’s Startup Studio team, the SVP will build and maintain trust with local startup leaders, stakeholders, and partners, and oversee the design of audience, product, and content strategies that implement concepts derived from AJP’s research into community information needs. They will ensure program designs fit the markets they’re created for, oversee the recruitment of highly talented and diverse teams, and ensure excellence in execution. They will identify incubation support and coaching needs; establish healthy systems, policies, and governance; and help startups avoid the common pitfalls and setbacks in launching new organizations and products. The SVP will oversee the planning and execution of communications strategies leading up to product launches.

This is a unique opportunity to join a growing, national movement to rebuild local news in communities across the country in a way that better serves the public, while being sustainable and independent.

Who we are

We’re an entrepreneurial team that’s passionate about journalism, civic engagement, and how local news plays a unique role in shaping our democracy. We help build and grow sustainable local news organizations all over the country — through financial investment, venture support, and movement building — that are governed by, sustained by, and look like the public they serve. AJP has raised over $240 million for the cause so far, and aims to catalyze enough investment in nonprofit local news to create a $2 billion sector by 2040, full of thriving, equitable, public service-oriented newsrooms that increase civic engagement and make communities work better for their residents. Learn about our grantees.

Our team is deeply connected to our mission and supportive of each other’s goals and overall well-being. We aim to be an organization where everyone feels heard, respected, and valued. We are an entirely remote, distributed team and strive to maintain a healthy, fun, and productive workplace, working alongside smart, energetic colleagues who enjoy one another and the work. Meet our full team.

Our values

• Local First: We know that local journalism must serve and be led by local communities. We make a practice of listening to, and making decisions with – not for – those communities, and connecting them to find strength in each other.
• Bold Leadership: We understand the severe economic challenge facing local news and thus democracy, and we embrace a sense of possibility with courage, urgency, and perseverance.
• Constant Learning: We recognize the unknown in front of us. Therefore, we operate with humility and a commitment to continuous improvement and collaboration.
• Commitment to Equity: We commit to creating a better, more diverse, and more inclusive news media that advances human and civil rights. We actively fight against injustice and racism, and that starts with doing the work ourselves.
• Integrity: We accept the responsibility of earning trust every day. We operate with honesty, transparency, dignity, and respect, and without allegiance to party, ideology, profit, or power.

Your team

Our venture philanthropy is catalyzing the nonprofit field by building a portfolio of organizations at varying stages of development. We invest growth capital in existing organizations, we are seeding new organizations in partnership with philanthropy, and we have incubated founding teams prior to their startup launches.

You’ll be part of a broader team responsible for supporting this portfolio, and be responsible for the successful launch of new nonprofit local news organizations being incubated through our Startup Studio program. You will report to the Head of the Startup Studio & Local News Innovation, and lead a team of dedicated staff (vice president of Newsroom Strategy and vice president of Audience Strategy) and contractors who together are responsible for launching exceptional nonprofit local news startup organizations such as Signal Ohio (which operates Signal Cleveland and Signal Akron), Free Press Indiana (which operates Mirror Indy), The LA Local, and the Tulsa Flyer.

The position

In this role you will have the following responsibilities:

Launching startups

• Lead the Startup Studio team and local startup leaders in ensuring the organizations we launch are exciting, innovative local news organizations that challenge industry norms on public service journalism and respond directly to local information needs
• Work with the Startup Studio team to guide local startup staff through preparations for launch, including developing coherent audience, product, and content strategies that align with their ambitious missions; establishing efficient workflows that effectively execute their strategies and result in powerful launch slates with a path to continuously and consistently producing impactful journalism
• Ensure Startup Studio team and local startup staff have deep, nuanced, and aligned understandings of who their target audiences are in market, and that they build a suite of compelling, modern, digital products that resonate with those audiences
• Lead and execute a communications strategy that builds toward a successful launch, including earned media coverage, influencer engagement, internal and external stakeholder management, and development of related materials
• Project manage execution of cross-functional workstreams between editorial, audience, development, and operations to ensure successful and on-time execution (e.g. websites/other products, organizational announcements, etc.)
• Learning: Stay updated on your execution-level understanding of best practices across the country in digital media

Talent and leadership

• Steward executive searches for the founding CEOs and Editors-in-Chief of the startup organizations we launch and incubate, and ensure that the searches result in top hires who are qualified and ready to lead impactful news organizations of the future.
• Oversee the search processes; ensure integrity and fairness, and work with the Startup Studio team to conduct nationwide talent scouting efforts and engage in active recruitment that results in highly qualified and diverse candidate pools that adhere to our values and meet strategic criteria for the startups to succeed.
• Project manage the search process for the founding CEO, sometimes with and sometimes without the assistance of a search firm (decision depends on market); ensure all stakeholders are aligned and excited about the leaders they hire.
• Lead the onboarding of the founding CEOs and other business and operations hires to set them up for success.
• Support startup CEOs through development of their staffing strategies, their partnership with their editorial leaders, and the creation of a welcoming, inclusive, healthy, and high-performing workplace culture.
• Oversee the onboarding of newsroom hires, and work with the local teams to develop workflows that make for healthy cross-team collaboration.

Organization establishment

• Build relationships with the founding boards of our startups and advise them as they build their governance structure and search for their founding leaders
• Project manage the incorporation, tax exemption, creation of initial governance structures, establishment of fiscal sponsorship agreements, etc., in partnership with the AJP operations team
• Serve as the main relationship holder for AJP’s operational relationship with the startup organization’s leadership and board, until the newsroom and business teams are fully up and running; demonstrate 360-degree understanding of program and business model, and represent it to board members and other stakeholders
• Work with the board finance chair and AJP’s business strategy lead in the initial creation, maintenance, and socialization of the budget; ensure budget owners within startups have an understanding of their budget management responsibilities
• Organize, plan and support interim CEO/permanent CEO in initial board meetings (until local operations staff are hired).
• At the end of fiscal sponsorship, work with startup COOs (or the equivalent) to offboard from AJP Startup Studio support to successfully transition ownership of the organization’s finance, board governance, and operations to the hired business team.
• Manage external contractors that work with us on incubating startups.
• Manage all board governance, legal and compliance matters for Startup Studio organizations, until they are fully staffed.
• Learning: Stay updated on your execution-level understanding of best practices across the country in nonprofit finance, governance, and operations, and help incorporate those lessons into AJP startups.

Movement building

• Contribute to fundraising efforts by telling the story of editorial programs and the co-creation of a compelling, clear case for support and corresponding materials that will be used throughout the incubation process. Audiences will include partners, grantmakers, and individual donors. Materials will be used for sales and fundraising, and may include media kits, slide decks, and fundraising websites that get results.
• Contribute to writing, editing, and quality control for all communications about our incubation projects, including press releases, grant applications and funding proposals, grant reports, stakeholder updates, and other materials used in garnering support for the startups.

Team management and development

• Cultivate an inclusive, and invigorating, and trusting environment for the Startup Studio team that empowers its members to continue to think innovatively while undergoing the sometimes grueling process of launching entire organizations from scratch.
• Coach and mentor a high-performing team in their positions as thought leaders in our organization and in the industry; establish clear expectations, provide regular and actionable feedback, and support professional development and growth.

Background and skills

This role is part of a bold and innovative program developed over the last several years, and there are few opportunities like it anywhere in the country. If you are energized by turning big ideas into real, living organizations and doing it alongside smart, mission-driven colleagues, this role offers a rare chance to do that at scale and join a growing, national movement to rebuild local news.

People from a variety of news media leadership backgrounds are encouraged to apply. Successful candidates will be passionate about the role local news plays in communities and care deeply about its future. They will have executive leadership experience in digital news organizations; they’ll be creative problem-solvers with a high sense of personal responsibility and meticulous attention to detail; and they’ll have interest in entrepreneurship, strategy, and operations.

Successful candidates will also be excellent and persuasive communicators, relationship builders, and talent developers. In addition to incubating new newsrooms, the SVP, Startup Studio will be elevating wins and lessons from our startup incubation work, and lead their team in the creation of content and materials critical for educating investors and talent about nonprofit news models. They will persuade funders and news consumers across the country to care about, and champion, public service journalism.

We know not all strong candidates will have all the skills we list. That’s OK. Research shows that women and people of color are less likely to apply for a position if they don’t meet every skill listed. At the American Journalism Project, we are committed to creating a better, more diverse, and more inclusive news ecosystem, and that starts with doing the work ourselves. So if your past experience doesn’t align perfectly, but you know this is the role for you – please tell us!

An ideal candidate will have…

• Management experience (in any field) is required. Interest, readiness, and willingness to continuously learn leadership and management best practices are also a must.
• Significant experience working in daily newsrooms and an understanding of complex editorial workflows with multiple dependencies and moving parts.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to synthesize large amounts of information and clearly communicate key insights, with a strong grasp of business concepts and numbers. Must be a persuasive communicator.
• An understanding of the value of diverse backgrounds and perspectives in workplaces, newsrooms, and coverage; willingness to learn and coach others through operationalizing inclusivity.
• Meticulous attention to detail and accuracy in documentation.

This role is a fit if you are…

• Excited about the opportunity for hands-on work building, leading, and growing sustainable news organizations, while putting your journalism skills and experience to impactful use.
• Enthusiastic about tackling challenges in a fast-paced startup environment, and have the stamina to continuously experiment and see projects to completion that help nascent news organizations succeed.
• Highly empathetic; you have an affinity for collaborative work, love for mentoring and inspiring others, and doing whatever it takes to motivate and organize people with diverse interests around a common goal.
• A person with strong personal responsibility and accountability, results-oriented, adaptable, skilled at situational management (including being able to manage up, laterally, and down).
• Willing to think outside the box to solve problems for which there are no blueprints for solutions.
• Accustomed to working in environments where feedback is liberally given and taken.
• Intellectually curious, a strategic thinker and an innovative problem-solver, including a proven ability to create and manage organizational change.
• Passionate about revitalizing local news so that it represents, engages and informs every member of the diverse public it serves.

Compensation & benefits

Our total compensation package is competitive in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, and we are committed to supporting our team with what they need to show up every day, ready to bolster the local press our democracy deserves.

We benchmark our salaries against similar organizations, and use a scale that considers job complexity and magnitude of responsibility to determine role levels and corresponding base salaries, as well as offer regular opportunities for salary increases. The salary range for this position is $189,633 – $208,596. Read about our benefits here.

What to expect in the hiring process

Our approach to hiring is to create a consistent and transparent process for all candidates. We hope to fill this role as soon as possible, though the hiring process can typically take from a few weeks to several months. We will do our best to communicate with you about timing expectations throughout the process. Please note, every application is reviewed by at least one member of our team, if not more, and we do not use AI or automated tools to screen candidates.

Candidates who advance to later rounds of this process can expect multiple interviews with members of our hiring committee. Semi-finalists will be asked to complete a hiring exercise designed to help us understand your thinking and approach to the role, and you will be offered an optional prep session to ask any questions that will help you put your best foot forward in this process. We aim to truly get to know you, to help you fully understand the role you’re applying for, and to get to know your prospective team.

Please submit an application through our portal. Download the full job description here. If you have any questions please feel free to email careers@theajp.org with “SVP, Startup Studio” in the subject line.

Information Session

We will hold a webinar-style information session on Zoom on Monday, May 11, at 6:00pm ET. During this session, you will hear directly from the hiring manager and other key staff at AJP, and you will have an opportunity to ask questions. To register, please click here. The session will be recorded and posted on our website.

The American Journalism Project is dedicated to equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees. The American Journalism Project encourages people of all races, colors, national origins, ancestries, creeds, religions, genders, ages, disabilities, veteran status, sexual orientations, and marital statuses to apply.

AJP complies with federal and state disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact careers@theajp.org.