PEP, Ingest Associate; Freelance

Job Description

The Opportunity

Versant is seeking a PEP Ingest Associate to support media ingest, recording, routing, quality control, file conversion, and troubleshooting across a fast‑paced news, entertainment, sports and digital production environment. This freelance role is ideal for someone with strong technical skills, sound judgment, and the ability to support producers, assignment desks, shows, and production partners in a deadline‑driven live production setting.

Why This Role Matters: The Ingest Associate helps ensure that critical media is captured, organized, verified, and delivered accurately so teams can move quickly and confidently across daily coverage, planned programming, and breaking news. This is an onsite role based in New Jersey
. Candidates must be able to work a flexible schedule, including overnight, weekends, and holidays as business needs require. This role is overtime‑eligible.

• Schedule and manage recordings for news gathering coverage, entertainment specials and live sports production in a quick‑turn environment.
• Ingest, convert, transfer, migrate, and back up a variety of digital media files across platforms, devices, and file delivery methods.
• Provide quality control for incoming footage, verify successful ingest, and ensure media is properly organized and ready for production use.
• Partner with producers, shows, assignment desk teams, and technical partners to support Media Ingest requests and troubleshoot file‑based ingest issues.
• Import and manage files from sources such as websites, FTP sites, Zoom, Skype, Face Time, Woody Social, and other digital gathering tools.
• Create screening exports and deliverables for producers and shows through online delivery methods or physical media as needed.

What You Bring

• 3+ years of experience working in a large media market or comparable production environment.
• Strong understanding of PC and Mac platforms, digital media workflows, transcoding, file conversion, and digital file delivery.
• Experience working in a production or newsroom environment with the ability to stay calm and focused under tight deadlines.
• Strong technical aptitude, troubleshooting skills, and comfort learning new tools, systems, formats, and codecs.
• Ability to build effective working relationships with producers, assignment desk teams, shows, and technical partners.
• A flexible schedule, including availability overnights, weekends, holidays, and breaking news coverage as needed.

You’ll also bring Versant’s How We Do It behaviors to the work:

• Trust: You handle media assets carefully, verify work for accuracy, and follow through on requests.
• Teamwork: You collaborate closely with production, editorial, and technical teams to keep content moving.
• Transparency: You communicate clearly when issues arise, elevate appropriately, and file discrepancy reports when needed.
• Agility: You adapt quickly to breaking news, changing show needs, and evolving technical workflows.
• Entrepreneurial Spirit: You are self‑managing, curious, and willing to learn new technologies that improve how work gets done.

Bonus points for experience setting audio/video levels to spec, verifying remote signal quality prior to air, or working with non‑linear editing and scheduling tools.

You’ll be part of a fast‑moving media environment where production, technology, and journalism intersect every day. This freelance PEP role offers the opportunity to support high‑impact news and digital coverage while working closely with experienced editorial, production, and technical teams. This role is based onsite in New Jersey and requires flexibility to support business needs, including nights, weekends, holidays, and breaking news coverage.

VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

If you…