Job Description

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism is a non-profit investigative reporting unit that produces deeply reported investigative stories in partnership with leading national news organizations like NPR, PBS NewsHour, The Associated Press and USA Today.

Based at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the center is led by veteran journalists who mentor and oversee early-career reporters. In 2025, the Howard Center was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a data-driven investigation into deaths in police custody produced in collaboration with the Associated Press and Frontline. We are seeking two full-time Data Journalists to join our team.

Key responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with center staff, graduate fellows, students, faculty and professional news organization partners to produce data-driven investigative journalism.
• Collect, clean and maintain structured datasets and document collections gathered by the center for use by news organizations, non-profit groups, researchers and others.
• Develop documentation memos, how-to guides, methodology white papers, virtual/in-person training seminars, software tools, programming libraries, data notebooks, “story recipes” or other artifacts to help others make use of structured datasets and document collections maintained by the center.
• Attend industry conferences and visit newsroom partners to teach, learn and promote use of Howard Center work. Assist in the identification of new partnership opportunities and in the maintenance of existing partnerships.
• Develop and test scalable investigative reporting techniques that rely on advanced computational methods, machine learning models, large language models and other forms of AI, and novel data sources.
• Teach at least one data journalism course per year at the college.

Qualifications and requirements:

• At least three years of data journalism experience in a professional newsroom, in a role that in some way involved writing code to perform common data journalism tasks.
• Experience with teaching, training or mentoring, which could include (but is not limited to):
  • K-12 or university-level teaching.
  • Leading a workshop session at an industry conference or in a newsroom.
  • Mentoring interns or early-career journalists.
  • Developing training materials.

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