Audience Engagement Specialist

Chicago Public Media is one of the nation’s largest local nonprofit news organizations. Home to WBEZ 91.5FM, the Chicago Sun‑Times, and Vocalo.

Chicago Public Media reaches more than 3.3 million people weekly across broadcast, print, and digital platforms. As a mission‑driven organization, we aspire to be the most trusted news source Chicagoans turn to for understanding the people, events, and ideas shaping our community.

Chicago Public Media is a 100% community‑funded newsroom powered by nearly 97,000 members whose support makes our journalism possible. This sustained community investment helped drive nationally recognized work in 2025, including 29 awards from esteemed organizations, including the Public Media Journalists Association, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, and the National Association of Black Journalists.

We believe independent journalism is essential to a healthy democracy and that access to objective, fact‑based news is a right for every citizen.

We are seeking an Audience Engagement Specialist to help grow, reach, and engage our digital audience with an emphasis on building deep relationships with our community, increasing trust, and enhancing loyalty. The ideal candidate should be passionate about journalism and how our reporting can fit into readers’ lives to help them better understand the city, their neighbors and themselves. Our next Audience Engagement Specialist should be dynamic, open to learning new tools and platforms, data‑driven, and have applied knowledge of journalistic ethics and standards.

• Reformat reporting for platform‑specific audiences (e.g., Instagram carousels, aggregate articles, social explainers, newsletters).
• Connect Chicago to the newsroom by identifying digital engagement opportunities (e.g., Reddit AMAs, Tik Tok, new platform guidance).
• Cover trending, live, and breaking news on platforms, and in ways that are most useful to the public (e.g., live blog support, Google Trends review, SMS, App alerts).
• Enhance in‑platform story reach and audience engagement (e.g., headline support, SEO review, in‑article modules, recirculation, programming fronts).
• Surface story ideas, coverage angles and format considerations through audience listening (e.g., social listening, Google Trends, analytics platforms).
• Curate home and section pages of the Sun‑Times website to showcase the most relevant, timely, and popular content, using data and experimentation.
• Edit and publish stories following the best practices of SEO, storytelling and audience engagement, optimizing content across multiple platforms to help target audiences find the content they want.
• SEO and share lines that appropriately reflect our reporting and attract diverse audiences, prioritizing factual accuracy and sound judgment, and complying with best ethical practices.
• Conceptualize, plan and create original audience‑focused callouts, posts (including Stories, Lives and Reels), projects or campaigns across our platforms – which may include social media, news aggregators, third‑party sites or owned and operated channels – to develop our diverse target audiences, working collaboratively with other colleagues and teams.
• Communicate effectively with other audience team members, journalists and colleagues and help CST reach its organizational goals by improving CST’s audience relationships, workplace culture, editorial excellence and impact.
• Solicit and respond to feedback from our readers on different platforms, helping to deepen our community relationships and demonstrate inclusivity of diverse experiences and perspectives.
• Consider data, community feedback and other research to develop deeper knowledge of our platforms and audiences; and experiment with different approaches to better reach, engage and serve target audiences, advising and steering editorial efforts to better serve our community.
• Identify trending and breaking news opportunities, working with editors and reporters to write or aggregate stories that build audiences based on those trends.
• Manage Sun‑Times’ social media channels, optimizing for sharing and engagement.
• Create multimedia content to enhance daily news coverage (video,…