We’re hiring two reporters

We’ve been granted funding through Coimisiún na Meán’s new Local Democracy Reporting Fund to hire two additional reporters, to add to our coverage of Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council for the coming year.

For each of the two roles, we’re looking for someone who is curious, open-minded, and conscientious. Someone who wants to engage with readers, is open to receiving and responding to feedback, and will stay true to the values of independent journalism.

You’ll be expected to report and write at least three original stories a week, which we’ll publish in our weekly online edition and our monthly print newspaper.

We prefer not to assign stories, so a big part of the job is coming up with things to write about – that haven’t been covered already by others, elsewhere – developing contacts, and learning to parse the news from the noise.

You’ll be expected to go beyond breaking-news-style reporting, to a deeper analysis and discussion of city and county affairs. Keep in mind we’re a weekly and a monthly – not a daily, or a minutely.

If you’re not already familiar with the kinds of stories we publish, please have a good read of our website to get a feel for it, and make sure it’s your kind of thing. If you hit the paywall and need a login to read more, let me know.

One of the roles will be focused on covering the Blanchardstown side of the Fingal County Council area, and the other will focus on the northern suburbs in the Dublin City Council area. Each will also have an additional, thematic focus – either transport and environment, or community safety.

We have a small office on Thomas Street, and you can come work here, or work from home, or be out and about in the area you cover, finding stories, meeting people, doing reporting. Or, most likely some combination of all three.

The jobs are full-time and pay €2,625 a month. They’ll be 12-month contracts because that’s how long the grant lasts for, but we hope to maintain these positions beyond that, if we are able to find funding to do so.

Please send applications to me at sam@dublininquirer.com by midnight on Wednesday 19 February. Applications must include:

1) A cover letter telling us why you’re a good fit for the job, and why you want to do it.

2) Two story ideas that you think would fit our publication.

3) Two writing samples or published clips.

We debated whether to apply for this grant

Ever since we launched Dublin Inquirer in 2015, we’ve been mostly subscriber-funded.

We do sell some ads, and we have got some grants, and we’re grateful for those, but the vast majority of our revenue each year has come from our readers.

We feel that works well, as readers just want us to do good journalism, and we just want to do good journalism, so it’s a good match.

As far as I can remember, we’ve never had a reader pressure us to cover or not cover something, and threaten to unsubscribe if we didn’t do what they said – and even if they did, they just wouldn’t have much leverage.

So when the Coimisiún na Meán announced the call for applications to the Local Democracy Reporting Fund, we debated a lot internally whether to apply.

If we take government money, does that compromise our independence? Can we report honestly on the government, or would we worry about not getting funded again in the next round of grants?

In the end we decided it would be good for readers, and for our mission of trying to help people know more about what is going on in their communities, to connect with it, to engage with it, and each other – if we could cover more things, and publish more stories.

And that we can remain independent while doing that, even if some of the money to pay for that is coming from the Coimisiún na Meán. Maybe that’s self-serving, just us telling ourselves what we want to hear.

Judge for yourself over the course of the next year. If you have questions or concerns along the way, get in touch and let us know.

Ideally, we’d earn enough new subscriptions in these coming 12 months so that that revenue could pay for the two positions going forward.

But if not, we’ll consider how this year went, and probably consult with our readers, and decide whether to apply again for funding from the Local Democracy Reporting Fund if there’s another call-out for applications for next year.