Gen Z Culture Reporter

The Kansas City Star, winner of nine Pulitzer Prizes, is looking for a vibrant and dynamic journalist to spearhead a new initiative to cover Gen Z life and relationships.

The Star is a dedicated, innovative newsroom determined to build the future of news — by fostering journalists, evolving our news coverage and building bridges within our community. It’s the perfect space for a visionary journalist who can understand and represent Gen Z to help us demonstrate the vitality of local journalism in today’s world.

In this role, you should spend your days talking to Gen Z residents of Kansas City. You should get to know where they live, party, work, date, exercise, eat, socialize, shop and relax.

Tell their stories. Highlight their problems. Reflect the things that matter most to them. Be their guide, their voice and their point of connection with their local community.

Show the rest of Kansas City the way Gen Z works —their culture, their hangouts, their stories —and how this generation is changing the ways so many of us work, socialize and relate to one another.

Of particular interest for coverage is the dating scene for young people in Kansas City and how relationships do and don’t work in this modern age. We want you to tell the stories of people who are actively trying to find connection in 2026 — and the success stories of those who’ve found it.

Inspirational, laughable, gut‑wrenching, eye‑opening, disheartening, charming, helpful, even just starkly realistic —we want stories that run the gamut and hit the highs and lows of love today.

A successful candidate for this role will bring many of their own ideas, an enthusiasm for all types of storytelling methods and a personality that will make their target audience want to connect with them. We want a journalist who understands that building a loyal audience around a topic requires publishing consistently and often.

This staff member should meet The Star’s high standards for accuracy, fairness and objectivity, and their experience and their work with us may take other forms than traditional news stories — think vertical video, first‑person pieces, man‑on‑the‑street interviews, photo or video essays, recurring columns, experiential journalism. We are ready and willing to break the mold for the right person and ideas that will fulfill our mission.

Willingness to be on camera, ability to form fast relationships with sources, and a talent for engaging storytelling are the top qualifications for this role. Existing relationships and/or a following with this audience are a major plus.

You should be able to write and make videos that show your personality, and listen constantly to what Gen Z needs and wants, hates and loves, knows and doesn’t.

With your reporting, you might help other residents of Kansas City understand their younger neighbors better and how the city is and isn’t serving them. You can put issues of affordability, access, social connection, political disenfranchisement and social justice in perspective to help everyone in Kansas City see their home more clearly.

While social media will obviously be a major facet of this role, our ultimate goal is to bring young people onto  and into the fold as loyal consumers. You should be able to balance those needs and create content that works on multiple platforms.

You’ll join a newsroom that is already full of young adults who are building their lives in Kansas City and are deeply passionate about informing their community. You will collaborate with a diverse group of reporters, photographers, video creators, audience strategists and editors to tell these stories and set the tone for The Star’s future engagement with Gen Z.

Kansas City is a vibrant, large city with a high quality of life – replete with iconic professional sports teams and a world‑class arts scene – and a low cost of living. It’s a fantastic place to put down roots, and this job offers the chance to contribute to its future.

McClatchy Media’s journalists are expected to take advantage of opportunities to ethically harness and leverage artificial intelligence and other automation to enhance and elevate their work and to find efficiencies…