Freelance visual editor

Schedule and pay

This role is roughly 20 hours per month. Schedule is flexible, but ideally you’d work a few afternoons per week. Pay is about $1,500 per month, or $75 per hour.

Santa Cruz Local is a nonprofit local news organization that serves residents of Santa Cruz County and the Pajaro Valley. Local journalists founded Santa Cruz Local in 2019 to give residents an unbiased, fair and accurate source of local news and information. In 2023, we launched Noticias Watsonville, Spanish-language audio news on Whats App. In 2025, we launched News for Students on Instagram and through civic events at Cabrillo College.

Read our strategic plan.

We strive to grow civic engagement through deep, fair and accurate reporting about local government, housing, health, transportation, the environment and other big issues in Santa Cruz County. We lift up voices not normally heard by local government or local media.

We want to:

• Inform residents with responsive, useful civic news.
• Connect residents with basic needs through our relevant, timely and accurate information guides.
• Show residents how to participate in local government and that they can impact decisions.
• Push leaders on residents’ priorities and hold them accountable.
• Inspire residents to join community groups and volunteer.

We want to reach communities not otherwise well-served by local media: 18- to 29-year-old students at Cabrillo Community College, Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Pajaro Valley, and people with low incomes. Our journalism has to be immediately useful and relevant to capture residents’ attention on mobile phones and engage people on the issues.

Your role would largely be centered on editing our social media content, but also our photos across all our products.

• Mentor and manage our Social Media and Photo Journalist to build useful, relevant and timely videos, images and infographics for Instagram tailored for 18- to 29-year-old Cabrillo students.
• Fact check and edit our visuals for accuracy, style, flow and clarity.

• Coach our Photo and Social Media Journalist to produce engaging local news and information (including short, mobile videos and infographics) with sharp and compelling writing and visuals that will resonate with and help grow our target audience of 18- to 29-year-olds.
• Edit photos across all our products (including our website and newsletter) and work with our Managing Editor to develop a visual strategy.
• Optimize workflows for featuring reporters’ stories on social platforms in a consistent, effective way.
• Work mainly with our Photo and Social Media Journalist to create clear, concise visual stories. Ask clarifying questions, suggest context and look for ways to make stories more readable and complete.
• Collaborate with team to run experiments to deepen engagement and increase reach.
• With other editors, monitor audience metrics on Instagram and identify, understand, reach, and engage target audiences.

• People centered: Loves to work with others and wants to learn how to be a supportive people manager.
• Diligent researcher: Detail-oriented, can systematically and rigorously review facts to ensure accuracy. Knows how to find source documents and is willing to call sources if they can’t verify.
• Photo and video: Experienced visual storyteller who can manage art across a variety of platforms including Instagram, web, newsletter and mobile. Knows how to write and edit compelling scripts for social media video.
• Experienced with social media products and analytics: Can analyze data and make data-informed decisions. Open to learning audience metrics tools to understand what issues and formats resonate with our communities.
• Clear judgment: Understands when more context is needed to fully understand a story. Can see when language is unclear or not neutral. Questions reporters when a quote seems out of context, and checks to make sure paraphrasing accurately reflects the intended meaning.
• Emotionally intelligent: Receptive to constructive feedback, comfortable challenging others respectfully, can manage conflicts or disagreements respectfully, calmly and successfully, can maintain…