Relief News/Op-ed Editors Needed
The Commons, an award-winning nonprofit community newsroom in Brattleboro, Vermont, is looking for occasional freelance backup editing assistance to help shape copy from a variety of contributors of varying experience and skills into clean, readable, lively prose that retains the writer’s voice.
We’re looking for seasoned, confident news editors who love the challenge of editing for clarity, brevity, style, and accuracy and who can do so rapidly and with good humor, humility, patience, pride in craft, and conscientious knowledge of fast-changing language around drugs, crime, gender, race, mental health, and other topics to be described and discussed with care in our pages.
Assignments can range from slashing a grotesquely overwritten press release into a snappy news brief to shepherding a magazine-quality longform cover story into print. We might also ask for your help in editing pieces for Voices, our dedicated editorial/op-ed section, where preservation of a writer’s voice is a top priority.
Turnaround needs can vary. Our normal production cycle runs from Saturday to Tuesday, with the files going to press and the content going live early Wednesday morning.
Remote work is fine, though it’s certainly helpful if you already know Vermont. We’d love to consider applicants who are not old, white, and male.
Visit commonsnews.org to see what we do. To apply, send a note along with a before-and-after edited news story (a document with tracked changes is welcome) and your hourly rate to Jeff Potter, editor, at editor@commonsnews.org.
December 2023