Deputy Executive Director

Floodlight is hiring a Deputy Executive Director to join our leadership team. This person will help us turn our strategic vision into reality, breaking it down into necessary systems and steps. They will work across the organization, supporting business, development, HR, operations and promotion, as well as editorial work. They are comfortable not just implementing systems, but building new ones as needed from the ground up.

Floodlight is a nonprofit, independent newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Since launching in 2021, Floodlight has collaborated with local and national news outlets including The Guardian, NPR, Pro Publica, the Los Angeles Times, the Texas Tribune, the Louisiana Illuminator and Capital

B. Floodlight stories reach millions of readers. Each story is distributed directly to hundreds of news editors and republished through aggregation services.

Floodlight’s model has shown how collaborative investigative journalism can have an impact. Our reporting with NPR and Florida news outlets about how power company consultants swayed elections, spied on journalists and bought media coverage was followed by the departure of two Fortune 500 CEOs. The stories were seen nationwide and reposted by more than 2,000 outlets. The coverage was a finalist for Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

More recently, Floodlight, along with local and national media partners, won top honors from the National Press Club in 2025 for exposing how corporations and special interests were manipulating public opinion by creating “news” outlets to push their hidden anti-renewable, pro-fossil fuel agendas — in two cases even taking over legacy local newspapers to do it.

This role will join a team of six: two investigative reporters, an investigative producer, an editor-in-chief, an audience and development director and an executive director. We all work remotely, with occasional travel for reporting, in-person meetings, industry conferences or events.

The Deputy Executive Director manages key behind-the-scenes systems to support Floodlight’s organizational performance, including HR, IT, legal, finance, travel and more.

At their best, the Deputy Executive Director builds automated, invisible systems to help the editorial team focus on producing great investigative journalism.

The ideal candidate is industrious, detail-oriented and a quick learner. Their role will be both strategic and tactical.

Applicants need not have experience in the news industry, but they must be well-versed in a similar nonprofit field.

• Partner with executive director, editor-in-chief and audience director to set and follow a strategic business and editorial plan

• Develop and/or manage the systems we use to track our work, including our databases for fundraising and editorial impact, as well as our back-end systems for retaining key documents
• Leverage efficiency tools and automations via Slack, Zapier, Airtable, Asana and more
• Manage shared tech stack (e.g., Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, 1
  
  Password, etc.)
• Identify cybersecurity risks and work to mitigate them

• Manage employee onboarding and offboarding processes
• Manage benefits administration

• Work with contractors on annual audit, 990 document and other compliance requirements

• Manage team travel bookings via Navan
• Spearhead planning for the annual staff meeting, as well as occasional events with external partners, which are aimed at increasing our brand recognition

• Lead board engagement, including onboarding new members and scheduling quarterly meetings

• Monitor and manage expenses in Quick Books
• Manage budget model, including projections and cash runway
• Manage expense reimbursements in Expensify
• Organize and manage payments, invoices and receipts in Justworks and Expensify

• Help us plan and execute reader donation drives

• Draft and/or design external and internal communications, including board decks, donor updates, team presentations, etc.
• Serve as a key deputy/thought partner/troubleshooter to the executive team