Head of Partnerships, Fellowship

The Tarbell Fellowship is one of the most competitive journalism programs in the world. We select 20+ fellows from 1,600+ applicants and provide fully-funded placements at outlets including NPR, CBS, MIT Technology Review, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. We’re hiring a Head of Partnerships, Fellowships, to forge and maintain the relationships with newsrooms that are crucial to our fellowship program’s success.

In your first year, you’ll help us scale our program to 25+ fellows and newsrooms and serve as our liaison to the broader world of journalism. You’ll own the relationships that are key to our success and impact. This is a rare opportunity to shape and improve a crucial beat in journalism at a time of rapid change.

The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism supports journalism that helps society navigate the development and deployment of advanced AI. We provide funding and training to strengthen AI reporting at major news outlets.

Since 2023, we’ve raised >$30M in funding and supported 75+ journalists through fellowships, grants, and residencies. We’re now entering a period of rapid expansion as we scale from a $4M budget in 2025 to $14M+ in 2027.

Across our programs, we’ve supported a wide range of impactful reporting:

We believe journalism will be essential to helping society understand and respond to AI advancements in the coming years. By 2030, we aim to grow Tarbell into the leading institution supporting AI journalism globally.

• Scout, forge, and maintain Tarbell’s fellowship relationships with top-tier newsrooms . Our fellowship program is currently supporting 28 fellows in 26 newsrooms in the US and around the world, and we’re planning for further growth in 2027 and beyond. You’ll propose newsrooms we should prioritize for expansion, own the strategy to get partners on board, and maintain our crucial ongoing relationships with existing partners.
• Build our journalism fellowship pipelines. You will be our primary on-the-ground representative in the journalism world, assisted by your colleagues: you’ll build relationships with individual journalists, professional organizations, and journalism schools to help us identify promising candidates for our fellowships, and attend conferences and target outreach to cement our reputation as a funder of world-class journalism.
• Consult on journalism-related topics as needed. We’ll occasionally ask you, along with other former journalists at Tarbell, to contribute your expertise to our overall operations. This might include interviewing fellowship candidates or teaching part of our journalism curriculum.
• Network on behalf of Tarbell and our fellows. Our long-term goal is for our fellows to stay in journalism in full-time roles not supported by Tarbell. As you negotiate our partnerships, you’ll also keep track of hiring needs and our fellows’ strengths so you can help us advance that goal. This could include planning occasional small mixers or networking events, or making one-on-one connections between hiring editors and current and former fellows.

• Newsroom experience, particularly as an editor
  . You’ve worked in journalism – likely on a science, technology, business, policy, or economics desk. You understand what it takes to succeed in a newsroom and what newsrooms are looking for in a reporting fellow. We think this experience is most likely to correspond to past roles as an editor, but we’ll consider reporters as well.
• Strong relationships in journalism and the ability to build more. Relationships are at the heart of this job. You’ll need to represent Tarbell’s interests with newsrooms — including giving cold pitches, winning over skeptical audiences, and navigating shifting newsroom strategies.
• Familiar…