Temporary Video Producer III, Planet

OVERVIEW

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We’re looking for an experienced video maker to help us transition into a new era of video at Planet Money. The role is part creator, part strategist, part trainer.

Maybe you are a creator ready to join a team. Maybe you are a visual journalist who likes to build systems and start things. Maybe you’ve managed social channels and want to apply that to public media journalism. Maybe something else we haven’t thought of. In any case, here’s the job.

First, you’ll work with the existing podcast/audio teams at Planet Money and The Indicator to pilot different types of social video or different processes for making them. Then together we will assess what works, what’s worth doing, and what’s not, and you’ll help us update our social video strategy and build sustainable workflows based on what we learn. By the end of your assignment, we hope to have a few new ways to represent our audio journalism on new platforms that our existing staff can sustainably carry on.

A big part of the job will be helping our audio producers become comfortable creating more video on their own. You’ll help the audio team learn new video tools, analyze metrics and make smart choices about what to adapt to video and what not to.

There’s wide latitude for experimentation, and an excellent team of creative, smart, fun journalists to collaborate with, including our existing video team. You’ll have lots of support and material to work with, and you’ll be a full part of the Planet Money and Indicator teams, with all the access to the podcast and reporting processes you need to make this work, including collaborating with our existing video colleagues.

This is a temporary role with a specific mission: help a talented podcast team get a sustainable social video operation up and running and set them up to carry it forward after the assignment ends. There may also be some opportunities to pilot longer-form video, but our first priority is getting short-form systems working well.

A little background may help you decide if this role is right for you:

Planet Money is like a little economics-themed media outlet within NPR. We explain how economics works and how it affects everyone’s life. We use stories to make the explanations memorable. We do this across media: two podcasts, Planet Money and The Indicator; regular segments on Morning Edition and All Things Considered; two newsletters; a nationally distributed weekend broadcast radio hour with How I Built This;

a bestselling book; a board game; and, of course, video.

We’re extremely proud of our video presence, which has gone through several eras, beginning with our T-shirt project in 2013, to a series of live-action shorts in 2019, to a runaway Tik Tok channel starting in 2020. Now we’re ready to experiment more broadly with how Planet Money and The Indicator show up on video,…