Sports Reporter Southampton, England
Job description
Sports reporter at the Daily Echo covering Southampton Football Club
Location: Southampton - paying up to £25k depending on experience
The award-winning Southern Daily Echo is looking for a top-class sports journalist to cover Southampton Football Club.
As part of the Echo’s commitment to in-depth coverage of Saints – no matter where the club is in the table – we’re looking for a digital reporter who can deliver up-to-the-second live blogs, match reports, exclusive interviews, analysis and much more.
In this role you’ll help drive digital subscriptions through your use of social media and stories - and act as an ambassador for the Echo’s Saints digital offering alongside our existing Saints reporter.
Reporting to the Editor, you’ll join a dynamic newsroom based in Ocean Village – just a short walk away from St Mary’s Stadium – writing for our loyal digital subscribers and our wider Saints audience comprised of hundreds of thousands of people every month.
You will be delivering the sort of fast, agile and dynamic coverage that our readers expect and deserve in 2023. As well as being at heart of live coverage, you will be passionate about digital storytelling, with a desire to come up with new and innovative ways of keeping fans up to date and produce entertaining stories using a vast array of different skills, tools and platforms.
This will include broadcasting on Facebook Live, working on daily newsletters for our thousands of e-mail bulletin subscribers – and continually searching for new ways to engage with fans.
Audience analytics will be a big part of the role, and you will be able to use data to spot what to write next and how to maximise the potential audience for your stories, as well as identifying trends.
You will not be stuck at home but will be working amid the buzz of our newsroom on reaction, transfer gossip, stats-based features, happenings around the club and carrying out interviews with players and staff.
You’ll be fast to react to what happens on and off the pitch but also capable of meeting a demanding content plan - week in, week out.
As expected you’ll work a varied shift pattern covering Saints games home and away. You will work evenings and weekends, with time off in the week. Our large office in Southampton gives you a great base from which to work so you will not be stuck at home but will be working amid the buzz of our newsroom on reaction, transfer gossip, stats-based features, happenings around the club and carrying out interviews with players and staff.
Key responsibilities:
- Driving digital subscriptions by writing high-quality, accurate digital sports stories, live blogs and features to deadlines as agreed
- Using a range of digital tools and platforms to tell stories, including video, audio, infographics and maps
- Using your SEO skills to spot trends and opportunities to reach the largest possible audience
- Crafting and posting social media posts to sell your stories and drive engagement
- Engaging with fans both in person and on social media and reflecting their views
- Using social media to build contacts and sniff out the best stories from your clubs and fan communities
- Engaging our loyal readers and expanding our reach through bespoke email newsletters and subscription messaging
- Being first to report accurate breaking sports news from your patch to keep readers bang up to date
- Thinking creatively to come up with new story ideas and ways to deliver them to our audience that suit our digital platforms
- Building our digital audience and social media following to bring our content to even more people in the community
- Spotting national/regional content that could resonate in your patch and making it relevant and interesting to our readers
- With guidance from the newsroom team, using analytics to identify what our readers like and what they want next from our coverage
- Building contacts in the community and getting out and about on your patch to see what’s really going on
- Joining forces with your counterparts across the UK to share ideas, best practice, success stories and skills
- An interest in a variety of diverse sports - not just football - and a good knowledge of the UK sports scene is important
Ideally, you will have:
- An NCTJ qualification
- A versatile, fresh and energetic writing style
- Exceptional attention to detail
- The ability to write - and think - quickly under pressure
- An adaptable style to produce everything from live blogs and listicles to long reads and features
- Skills with shooting and editing video as well as online tools and apps for producing images and audio
- A keen news sense
- Bags of ideas for how stories can be presented in the best possible way for our audiences
- An understanding of what audiences want, and when
- A good sense of humour
- Knowledge of SEO and its importance to digital journalism
- Excellent knowledge of relevant media law as it affects sports news
- Firm grasp of local and national sports media content and coverage, and what digital sports news looks like in 2023
- Excellent social media skills and the ability to spot stories and trending topics
- Great people skills and the ability to get on with a wide range of people in the community
- A high level of organisation and the ability to manage your own diary out on patch
- Collaborative skills to pool ideas with the wider digital reporting team and take on board suggestions
If this sounds like a role for you then please send your CV and a brief covering letter/email.
The closing date is May 7, 11.59pm
Job Type: Full-time
Salary: £22,000.00-£25,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Company pension
- Free parking
- Private medical insurance
- Sick pay
Ability to commute/relocate:
- Southampton: reliably commute or plan to relocate before starting work (required)
Work Location: In person
Application deadline: 07/05/2023
