Kinsa is looking for a Data Journalist to join our rapidly growing team. This is an opportunity to dig into a rich, proprietary dataset created by our network of millions of smart thermometers and accompanying mobile apps, and generate stories and insights that drive our national conversation about how, when and where to respond to the biggest health crisis our nation has faced in decades. You are the storyteller, you will have a huge audience across all media outlets, government entities, and individuals throughout the US.  You will be the voice behind the impressive science that makes Healthweather make sense to all.

 

Your mission will be to discover, pitch and write evidence-based stories that reveal insights uniquely available from Kinsa’s data, and share them with the world. In the recent past, our data has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, on Rachel Maddow, CNBC, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, etc. You will be tasked with elevating our nascent data journalism practice by uncovering new stories and telling them both in writing, and visually — your stories will come to life on our blog and social media, and in interactive, narrative visualizations on our Healthweather.us site. Good storytelling ability, an understanding of the basics of web production, and the ability to write and edit copy for web and social media are all a must for this position.

 

 

You are a master storyteller who can deal with a variety of datasets, including public data, so experience parsing, scraping, wrangling, cleaning, and analyzing data is a must. The ideal candidate is experienced with SQL and Python or R, and has methods of producing prototype visualizations quickly (e.g., using libraries like seaborn or ggplot, or tools like Tableau or Mode). Bonus points if you have at least some experience with front-end web development, extra bonus points if you’ve built or prototyped custom data visualizations for the web (probably using a library like D3, ChartJS or react-vis).

 

You’ll be integrated with a team of data scientists, analysts, engineers, designers and product managers who care deeply about public health, and are passionate about taking the opportunity in front of us and running with it. You will not be doing this alone: we have a small group of highly competent and dedicated professionals who will help you move the work forward.

 

That said, this is a new function at Kinsa, so the ideal candidate will be someone who’s comfortable taking initiative on their own, as well as working collaboratively with a larger team. You will have continual and sustained support from your team, and you will take ownership of the broader need: to identify and visually communicate insights that are vital to the public interest, and that push our mission forward.

 

●      Explore our data in combination with data from our partners, and publicly available data, to identify stories that help push our mission forward.

●      Pitch those stories internally, and work cross-functionally with designers, engineers, product managers and others to bring them to life.

●      Help us tell those stories in a variety of media — including writing blog and social media posts, sketching infographics or creating videos, and contributing to interactive narrative visualizations for the web. (You don’t need to be an expert in all of these categories, but you should be familiar with and understand the production process for each.)

 

●      Experience writing about, reporting on and analyzing data to create compelling stories for a news audience.

●      Experience discovering, analyzing and telling stories with data.

●      Experience with querying, managing and processing data with SQL and Python or R.

●      Methods for parsing, scraping, cleaning and analysing data from a variety of sources.

●      Ability to explore data visually and prototype data visualizations, including interactive visualizations with multiple states, controls, temporal aspects, etc.

●      Desire and ability to work in a cross-functional team, and communicate across functions (e.g., to designers, engineers, managers, etc.).

●      Desire to take ownership of an early-days workstream at a growing startup and push it forward, accelerating the pace of storytelling and leveling up the quality of our work.

 

 

When applying please include resume, published work, and brief description of your contribution to the work

Be Passionate: The Kinsa team is driven towards a goal that is bigger than themselves, they have a real passion in working toward a solution for a widespread social issue. Our work is stimulating, meaningful and has purpose.

Be Committed:We are committed to our mission. We have a tremendous opportunity in front of us: to change the face of public health and save hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. We are committed to working hard, working smart, working together, and doing what it takes to make a difference. Our time is now.

Be Efficient: We are a startup, and we are proud of our work so far but there is a lot more work to be done. Moving fast is the result of good planning, decision making, and execution.

Be Inclusive: Solving one of the most important public health problems of our time requires a mix of perspectives and approaches, which is why diversity of age, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, religious belief and ethnicity are all welcome and greatly valued at Kinsa. We are as proud of our differences as we are of our shared passion for stopping the spread of infectious illness, and are always looking for people with varied viewpoints, skill sets, backgrounds and experiences to realize our mission.