Position Description

The Community Manager will be charged with helping further the dialogue started at the Block by Block Community News Summit in September.

In this part-time position, the community manager will help entrepreneurial local news publishers across the country connect to share emerging best practices for generating content, engaging with communities, using technology tools and developing revenue streams to sustain their work.

We are seeking someone who is addicted to the conversation about the future of community news and information. The best candidate will be someone with experience in community news, preferably in an online startup.

Candidates should have strong written and oral communication skills and a broad understanding of the social media universe. They should be comfortable using technology and conversant in emerging new tools.

Most important, candidates should be able to connect disparate threads of information, to see emerging patterns and to help identify topics worthy of further exploration. We need someone who is a good listener with an inquisitive spirit, someone who regularly asks the “how’’ and “why’’ questions and shares the resulting answers with the broader community.

A background in training or education will be valuable. One of the tasks for the community manager will be to help us identify from the ongoing conversation the skill sets or knowledge sets that the community of publishers needs to develop. We hope to use what the community manager learns to help develop both virtual and onsite training programs for local publishers.

Among the other skills we expect in the community manager are:

• The ability to work in a self-directed manner
• Strong collaboration skills
• The ability to work with a variety of personality types and to adjust communication methods to serve those different personalities
• Strong research and reporting skills

Among the tasks the community manager should expect to perform are:

• Curating blog posts to Twitter and Facebook
• Engaging the Twitter audience and developing new followers
• Minute-by-minute participation in scheduled community Twitter chats surround Block by Block content, answering comments, integrating resources and serving as a mediator for the conversation.
• Suggesting, creating and managing topics for chats and blog posts.
• Pushing out blog posts and messaging through all types of outreach (social media, email, conference call).
• Conducting regular “beat checks’’ of Block by Block publishers to identify new ideas, best practices and potential topics for further group discussion.

This position will be a virtual one; geography is not a barrier for applicants. At this time, we expect the position to occupy approximately 20 hours a week. 

 If you are interested in applying or would like to learn more, contact Janet Coats, New Media Journalism Initiative Manager, The Patterson Foundation at jcoats@thepattersonfoundation.org.