Audience Engagement Specialist

About Chicago Public Media

Home to WBEZ and the Chicago Sun‑Times, Chicago Public Media serves more than 2 million people weekly across broadcast, print, and digital platforms. As a mission‑driven organization, we aspire to become the essential and most trusted news source that Chicago turns to each day for understanding the people, events, and ideas that shape our community.

In 2025, Chicago Public Media engaged 4.1 million audience members, shared 21,267 stories, informed 704,369 newsletter subscribers, and inspired 96,737 supporting members. We also reached 1.5 million social media followers.

Additionally, Chicago Public Media received 29 awards last year from esteemed organizations, including the Public Media Journalists Association, National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Online News Association, Illinois Press Association, Education Writers Association, Edward R. Murrow Awards, National Association of Black Journalists, and National Headliner Awards.

Chicago Public Media believes independent journalism is essential to a well‑functioning democracy and access to fact‑based, objective news and information is a right of every citizen. We serve the public interest by creating diverse, compelling content that informs, inspires, and enriches. We connect diverse audiences and help them make a difference in the community, the region and the world. And, we employ approximately 250 staff who want to belong to an organization that inspires, supports, and challenges them to do their best work.

For more information, please see the Chicago Public Media Annual Report.

We are seeking a current Chicago Sun‑Times News Guild employee interested in transferring to an Audience Engagement Specialist role to help grow, reach, and engage our digital audience with an emphasis on building deep relationships with our community, increasing trust, and enhancing loyalty. The ideal candidate should be passionate about journalism and how our reporting can fit into readers' lives to help them better understand the city, their neighbors and themselves.

Audience Engagement Specialists should be dynamic, open to learning new tools and platforms, data‑driven, and have applied knowledge of journalistic ethics and standards.

The Ideal Candidate Has a Desire To Connect Chicago To Our Award‑winning, Fact‑based, And Community Centered Journalism. We Do This By Collaborating With Editors And Reporters To

• Reformat reporting for platform specific audiences (e.g., Instagram carousels, aggregate articles, social explainers, newsletters).
• Connect Chicago to the newsroom by identifying digital engagement opportunities (e.g., Reddit AMAs, Tik Tok, new platform guidance).
• Cover trending, live, and breaking news on platforms, and in ways that are most useful to the public (e.g., live blog support, Google Trends review, SMS, App alerts).
• Enhance in‑platform story reach and audience engagement (e.g., headline support, SEO review, in‑article modules, recirculation, programming fronts).
• Surface story ideas, coverage angles and format considerations through audience listening (e.g., social listening, Google Trends, analytics platforms).

Candidates should have an interest and some understanding of online communities, platform dynamics, and shifting audience behaviors on emerging, established, and owned platforms. Audience duties consist of:

• Curate home and section pages of the Sun‑Times website to showcase the most relevant, timely, and popular content, using data and experimentation.
• Edit and publish stories following the best practices of SEO, storytelling and audience engagement, optimizing content across multiple platforms to help target audiences find the content they want.
• SEO and share lines that appropriately reflect our reporting and attract diverse audiences, prioritizing factual accuracy, demonstrating sound judgment and complying with best ethical practices.
• Conceptualize, plan and create original audience‑focused callouts, posts (including Stories, Lives and Reels), projects or campaigns across our platforms – which may include social media, news aggregators, third‑party sites (social, Apple News, etc) or owned…