Senior Visual Editor

Your New Role

We are looking for a Senior Visual Editor on a 12-month maternity cover contract. The postholder will help pitch, edit, and execute visual storytelling across our website and off-platform like our apps and social, working as part of our Special Projects team — from graphics and interactives to emerging storytelling forms like AR + motion graphics.

The person in this role will work across the different digital editorial verticals to help shape visual narratives and coverage, while also collaborating with a team of visual editors, journalists and designers across the organization. This is a player/coach role, where you’ll have ownership over shaping story ideas while also being able to get hands on in building out projects. The position is based in the London Bureau.

CNN’s Special Projects team: Part of the wider CNN Visuals team, Special Projects are a core team of editors and creative technologists that champion our most ambitious visual journalism and build frameworks for how we do special projects across the Visuals teams and at CNN. This group also take the lead on building out a more expansive kit of visual storytelling tools — pulling from our best work across all the Visuals teams, templatizing it, and allowing us to more easily design and publish creative, audience-driven digital journalism

Role Accountabilities

• Identify and pitch visual story ideas

• Partner with other editors and reporters to brainstorm visual coverage ideas and find gaps in current story planning for our biggest priorities. Plan proactively for major events and identify strong visual opportunities

• Assign and edit work by visual reporters and designers

• A key part of this role will be acting as Lead Editor on bigger Special Projects, Coordinating the team and the project, acting as a liaison with stakeholders, and visuals team members, ensuring good comms as well as bringing a sharp visual editorial lens to each project.

• Collaborate with the Art Department, Data & Graphics and Photos teams to refine standards and best practices for storytelling forms including data visualizations, interactives, photography, illustrations, and animations

• Help manage a technical and design roadmap to templatize our most successful experiments and storytelling patterns, working closely with Product partners to align with CMS development

Qualifications & Experience

• You possess solid visual journalism experience gained within a newsroom setting

• You are enthusiastic about excellent visual journalism and can share that enthusiasm with patience and clarity

• You love to experiment with new forms of storytelling, visual journalism and technology

• You put the journalism first, have impeccable news judgment, and are always asking “what’s the best way to tell this story?”

• A reader-first perspective and strong commitment to multiplatform storytelling

• You’re comfortable working collaboratively, individually and with cross-functional teams

• You are an excellent communicator and feel as comfortable walking through a story pitch with editors as you do coaching a developer on an interactive interface.

• We’re flexible on your exact skillset as long as you bring curiosity and willingness to learn. But you will ideally have some combination of editing experience, art direction, product design, user experience and prototyping skills (Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Zeplin, protpie, Flinto, Principle etc.), mapping and graphics skills (Illustrator, AI2html, QGIS), data analysis (R, Python, etc.), and development and visualization skills (HTML, CSS, Javascript and JQuery, d3, three.js or other visualization libraries).

Please include at least 3 links to projects that you have edited or worked on recently on your CV