When I was laid off from Spotify two years ago, I was convinced I could find a new job through LinkedIn or Twitter. Then, a former colleague offered different advice: “You have to get on the audio listservs,” she said.
She explained that most podcast and radio jobs – especially freelance gigs – aren’t listed on LinkedIn or job portals. They’re primarily sent out on several audio listservs on Google Groups.
While I found my next gig through word of mouth, audio listservs are just one example of how searching for media jobs isn’t always as simple as uploading your résumé and hoping to get a call from a recruiter. Depending on whether you want to report on TV, write for digital or work on podcasts, each journalistic platform has its own spaces and networks for finding open roles.
“Look for the places where people are collecting themselves and organizing around the kind of work that you do,” said Phoebe Gavin, a career coach and former editor at Vox, ThinkProgress and Quartz. “It’s a great way to network, and it’s also a great way to get insights on new opportunities.”
I spoke with journalists across mediums about how and where to look for roles. Here’s what they had to say.
TV news jobs: Network and stay connected
When Maya Brown started NBCU Academy’s two-year Storytellers program, she knew her next step was to challenge herself by leaving her home in New York to be a multimedia journalist at a local station elsewhere.
First, she applied for multimedia reporting roles through company job portals, like those of Gray Television, Hearst and Scripps. “Honestly, I wasn’t finding jobs,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I really want to be in that city,’ but I soon found out they were too big a market for me.”
Brown gained more traction when she reached out to a recruiter she met years ago as a college student at a National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention. The recruiter remembered Brown and helped her apply to a few roles. Brown was offered jobs at three stations within a week, but she chose WCSC in Charleston, South Carolina, where the recruiter once worked as an anchor.
“At this point, I felt like she knew me and what my concerns were when it came to finding a city that was the right fit,” Brown said. “I took that seriously, too, because she was a Black woman who felt like Charleston was a good place to be.”
Scott Williams, NBCU News Group talent acquisition director, also recommends strong candidates stay in touch with recruiters even if they don’t get the job. “I’ve personally kept in contact with candidates over the years,” he said. “It maybe didn’t work out the first or second time, but then the right opportunity came up, and I was in a position to recommend them based on our conversations.”
Connections come in all forms. After having graduated from Emerson College, Kate Tillotson got her first on-air job at KCFW in northwest Montana thanks to a recommendation from a former classmate.
“Like anything, it’s relationship-based,” said Tillotson, a former anchor who now works with journalists as the founder of The Beacon Group, a communications firm. “News directors tell me constantly that it’s not hard to find candidates. It’s hard finding the right candidates. In those first years, you rely on the connections you do have to vouch for you.”
Audio jobs: Check email listservs
There are over 20 mailing lists, Facebook groups and Slack channels for the radio and podcasting community to find jobs, according to a list maintained by the Association of Independents in Radio. They include Google Groups like LADIO for female-identifying audio storytellers and Tanya’s Tips, a listserv started by journalist and educator Tanya Ott.
AIR’s membership and programs manager, Lynn Casper, pointed out that these spaces are crucial because they’re where many companies and journalists advertise for a key type of entry-level freelance gig in audio: tape syncs, in which a reporter is asked to record high-quality audio of an interview in a specific location by a journalist or an organization in a different location.
“It’s a great way to get established with a company,” Casper said. “It’s a good résumé builder and a great way, if you’re just starting out, to get used to using your equipment, going out into the field.”
With the cuts at many NPR stations and podcasting studios, it’s a challenging time in radio and podcasting. Many audio journalists are turning to Patreon, a creator monetization platform, and forming co-operative companies to get creative projects off the ground.
“It’s trying to figure out what the future is going to be and how we can use the technology that we have access to to create something new,” they said.
Text jobs: Scour Slack, LinkedIn and newsletters
Nearly a decade ago, it was common to see editors at media publications posting freelance journalism opportunities and jobs on X (formerly Twitter). However, with news organizations and journalists having left the platform in recent years, that’s no longer the case.
As the editor and founder of the journalism jobs newsletter West Coast Media Jobs, I now mostly source staff and freelance jobs via LinkedIn posts. Gavin agreed that LinkedIn is a better option than X and suggested following editors from your favorite publications to see when they post freelance gigs or jobs.
“Definitely curate, unfollow people who are posting things that you’re not interested in,” Gavin said. “Send those signals to the algorithm so that your feed reflects what you want it to and follow the people that you want to work for and want to write for.”
Gavin also advised subscribing to job newsletters and joining both formal and informal online groups, like the Journalists of Color Slack.
“It’s become a huge community of journalists who are incredibly supportive of each other, including posting jobs,” she said. “Whatever identity markers you have and whatever specific aspect of journalism that you’re working in, there’s probably an informal Slack community for that.”
Pivoting mediums: Lean into storytelling
A few years ago, Tillotson pivoted from her longtime evening news anchor role at WWMT in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a career in communications. She wanted to return home to the East Coast and eventually secured a job via LinkedIn as a communications manager for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, a trade group.
“I was looking at job opportunities on LinkedIn using those location filters,” she said. “Time and time again, the trade associations kept popping up. I found very early on that trade associations in particular are drawn to job candidates with journalistic skills, because a lot of the lobbying and advocacy that goes on in D.C. all comes down to storytelling.”
Brown started her career behind the camera, working in social newsgathering at CNN and NBC News. When she wanted to pivot to on-air reporting, she made sure to have a reel that displayed her on-camera presence and storytelling skills.
“The main thing I heard in my interviews was that I’m very personable,” she said. “You can always work on your shots and your writing, but you have to know who you are. You choose the stories you tell, and that shines through in your reel.”
Even if you’re short on clips, you can create opportunities to build your reel, Williams said. “With how good cameras are in smartphones or even amateur sets you can buy online, there’s no reason an aspiring journalist can’t go out and tell stories in their community,” he said. “And then use that as a portfolio to break in.”
