Personal Finance Trending Reporter – Newsquest (Remote)

This is a remote role based in the UK and will be staffed on a Monday to Friday shift that must be covered from 8 am-4 pm with room to be flexible when required.

Newsquest is seeking a top-class trending reporter to specialise in personal finance and help build on its online and print coverage across the UK.

Every day our online news brands reach millions of people right across the UK, and personal finance is one of the key topics we cover – as well as one of the most in demand from audiences. You will be joining our central content team of driven, innovative journalists taking our trending and personal finance content to the next level.

This role presents an exciting opportunity for a digitally-savvy journalist with a knowledge of personal finance topics and a passion for SEO trends and practices.

The key for this role is tapping into these often complex topics and making them not only relevant but insightful and understandable for local audiences in their day-to-day lives.

Whether it’s helping readers navigate the world of work and pensions, understand the latest changes in government policy or legislation or offering key insights on how changes in the housing market affect them, we need a reporter who is on the pulse with what matters to people.

You’ll be passionate about digital storytelling, with a desire to come up with new and innovative ways of telling those stories using a vast array of different skills, tools and platforms.

We want to give our readers the content they want to read when they want to read it. Your job will be to anticipate this and use your sparkling writing skills to ensure our coverage is the best, and where local audiences choose to come first.

Key responsibilities:

• Using your SEO skills to reach the largest possible audience
• Using search tools to research and understand the personal finance topics people are searching for
• Identifying personal finance topics in which local brands can legitimately become an authority
• Writing high-quality, accurate digital news stories, live blogs and features to deadlines
• Work with UK Today editor to understand what to research and write next
• Thinking creatively to come up with new story ideas and ways to deliver them to our audience that suit our digital platforms
• Building on previously successful stories with a range of follow-up ideas
• Building our digital audience following to bring our content to even more people in the community
• Spotting personal finance content and topics that could resonate with our readers and making it relevant and interesting
• Helping devise and manage a carefully plotted personal finance calendar to ensure we don’t miss a beat when it comes to major events such as budgets, changes to interest rates and changes to energy bills
• Working with commercial teams to identify revenue opportunities and partnerships in the world of personal finance separates your independent editorial output
• Establishing relationships with central print teams to understand what content their readers want and need for our newspapers
• Ensuring every piece of content is thoroughly researched and balanced before publication
• With guidance from editors, using analytics to identify what our readers like and what they want next from our coverage
• Joining forces with your counterparts across the UK to share ideas, best practices, success stories and skills

Our ideal candidate will have:

• An understanding of search engine optimisation (SEO) and skills in producing content which works in search
• An understanding of key personal finance topics, including benefits, pensions, interest rates and inflation
• An ability to simplify complicated topics to suit a wide range of audiences
• Knowing what readers want to read, using both your keen news sense and data insights
• Passion for telling stories which will grow new diverse audiences
• Exceptional attention to detail
• The ability to write – and think – quickly under pressure
• 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
• Excellent social media skills and the ability to spot stories and trending topics
• NCTJ qualification (including 100wpm shorthand)
• Excellent knowledge of relevant media law
• An adaptable style to produce everything from live blogs and listicles to long reads and features
• Collaborative skills to pool ideas with the wider digital reporting team and take on board suggestions