KC Food Insider

The Kansas City Star, winner of nine Pulitzer Prizes, is seeking a personable, audience-oriented journalist to become our KC Restaurant Guide.

Kansas City loves to eat. It's at the center of our "going out" plans, a huge part of our entertainment. And we have a remarkable award-winning restaurant scene that offers some of the best meals you can find anywhere. It's not just barbecue - really.

And almost as much as we love to eat, we love to talk about our food:
What's the best? Why don't we have...? Whatever happened to...? Where can I find...?

This Kansas City reporter will be tasked with answering all those questions and more, joining our existing restaurants and retail reporter to expand our coverage of this vibrant food scene and our engagement with these voracious readers.

Stories might include openings and closings, high-utility lists, Q&As with readers, behind-the-scenes features, first-person pieces and nuanced discussions of how KC's food scene compares to others.

The successful candidate will bring creativity to their storytelling, an ability to listen to our audience, and a voice that makes Kansas Citians want to connect with them.

This reporter will be expected to research and write compelling stories that serve our readers' needs, especially helping them find the food they want and offering perspective on the city's food offerings. You'll be expected to follow the latest news and conversation in local dining, connect with sources in the industry and continuously pitch new ideas.

Direct interaction with our audience will be a huge part of the job, including filming and appearing in videos for our website and social platforms; sharing responsibility for a weekly newsletter; and talking to locals in person and virtually about their needs and questions, including at Star events.

We are looking for an enthusiastic reporter who works collaboratively with editors, other reporters, visual journalists and our audience team to tell essential local stories across platforms that grow and engage our local audience and build long-term loyalty among our subscribers.

You'll join a reporting team that is fun, creative, and always looking for new ways to connect and inform with our diverse audience across platforms. The newsroom you'll join is deeply committed to listening to, engaging with and meeting the needs of our neighbors across the Kansas City metro area.

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 that free them to focus on source-building and high-quality, deeply reported journalism.

In this role, you will need to:

• Find, pitch and execute stories that build and engage local readership
• Write with power, verve and personality
• Build a network of sources to find unique stories that inform, delight and engage readers looking for what to eat, drink and do in Kansas City
• Think about audience first and always, with a commitment to tactics that grow readership
• Master engaging multimedia storytelling, especially influencer-style vertical video
• Curate and write a newsletter bi-weekly with an openness to feedback and focus on voice
• Demonstrate storytelling, speed and SEO savvy
• Work well in a team environment, both virtually and in person.

The successful candidate should meet many of the following requirements:

• A deep knowledge of restaurants, food and retail industries, especially in the Kansas City area
• Familiarity with data, public records and business reports
• Comfort with audience-oriented story formats like callouts, polls, lists and Q&As
• College degree or equivalent work experience
• At least 1-3 years of reporting experience
• Excellent news judgment and a demonstrated ability to "see the story" that is going to matter to readers
• Must have reliable transportation. Must have valid driver's license and vehicle insurance required (at least minimum insurance required for the state in which the employee works)
• Unwavering commitment to accurate, ethical journalism
• Ability to work collaboratively to aggressively tackle stories with urgency
• Comfort with a job that will be demanding, fast-paced and constantly evolving as our region grows

What we'll bring:As a journalist at McClatchy, you will join a supportive, flexible, collaborative team. McClatchy strives to be an employer of choice, and our benefits package is made with this goal in mind. With a focus on health, well-being, wealth and daily life, our package options include health care coverage for employees and their families, financial protection from expected and unexpected expenses, multiple no-cost wellness resources and even coverage for four-legged…