Texas Tribune Fellowship

Job Description

The Texas Tribune — a nonprofit, nonpartisan digital news organization — offers paid fellowships to college students. Fellowships allow aspiring journalists, graphic artists, software engineers, and marketing professionals to hone their skills and learn a host of new ones that will prepare them for modern newsrooms. Available fellowships include:

• Data Visuals fellows work closely with reporters and editors to generate story ideas, gather public data and comb through the results to tell data-driven, visual stories.
• Engagement fellows keep the Tribune’s social media running, writing Twitter threads and creating Instagram stories. They write newsletters and comb through tips we get from crowdsourcing.
• Engineering fellows support technology and innovation efforts across the organization, including the core website and content management system, membership services, platform integrations, and analytics products. We are seeing and testing many opportunities for AI and machine learning to enhance our products and processes across the organization, and we are seeking fellows who are eager to work with us to explore and build tools in this growing space.
• Events fellows play a key role in promoting the Tribune's journalism and in planning and executing several dozen events each year, featuring policymakers talking about some of the most important issues facing our state — from coronavirus to immigration — and, of course, the annual Texas Tribune Festival held in downtown Austin.
• Marketing and Communications fellows assist in coordinating marketing and media relations for Tribune products; help the MarCom team with copywriting, social media placement, project management and field marketing; and lead community outreach efforts through email and phone calls.
• Photography fellows shoot photos in Central Texas and beyond for our digital-first publication.
• Product fellows work across departments to shepherd major projects and initiatives that support both editorial and business needs, helping us gather and analyze data to inform feature development and product prioritization.
• Production Design fellows assist with digital and print-related design production, including rapidly creating digital and print-related projects with sharp attention to detail and supporting our promotional and experiential materials for editorial, events, business, and marketing.
• Texas Reporting fellows work from across Texas to cover policy impacts, policymakers and the role of Texas in national politics.
• Washington, D.C., Reporting fellows work alongside the Washington correspondent to cover the Texas congressional delegation, U.S. House and Senate elections, and the biggest Texas news in the nation’s capital.

Previous fellows have helped coordinate, promote and execute some of the Tribune’s 60+ annual events, including the annual Texas Tribune Festival. They've also written about how a voucher proposal working its way through the Legislature spurred a mix of excitement and wariness in the Texas homeschooling community, provided photographs and video for a story about Llano River communities fighting a former oil executive’s plan for a private dam, and did in-depth, data-driven reporting on how Texas bats are facing a pandemic of their own. 

See recent work by Texas Tribune fellows here.

The Tribune pays fellows $6,500 a semester and is accepting applications for 2025 fellowships on a rolling basis:

• Applications for spring and summer fellowships are due at midnight, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024.
• Applications for fall fellowships are due at midnight, Sunday, Feb. 16, 2025.

2025 fellowships start with a mandatory orientation. The dates for the 2025 fellowships are

• Spring: Mandatory orientation is Friday, Jan. 10. The fellowship is part-time, 18-20 hours a week, and students will work around their class schedules. The fellowship ends on May 30.
• Summer: Mandatory orientation is Monday, June 9. The fellowship is full-time, 40 hours a week, and ends on Aug. 15.
• Fall: Mandatory orientation is Friday, Aug. 22. The fellowship is part-time, 18-20 hours a week, and students will work around their class schedules. The fellowship ends on Dec. 19.

About The Texas Tribune

Here’s what you should know about the Tribune. From day one, we’ve had disruption, innovation and risk-taking in our DNA. We’re ambitious and still have the punch-above-your-weight mentality of a scrappy start-up. We want to become the number one media organization in Texas and always want to expand our boundaries.

We’re nonprofit because the challenging economic reality for the media these days obligates us to find a different, reliable and sustainable way to fund serious journalism. We’re nonpartisan because we live in the United States of Confirmation Bias — and we don’t need to be part of the problem. We don’t need to be yet another source of information affirming the voices and perspectives that are already in people’s heads. At the same time, nonpartisan is not non-thinking. We call B.S. when B.S. needs to be called.

All of us at the Trib believe the best way to achieve that mission is to resemble the state we cover. We’re committed to building an inclusive newsroom for people of all backgrounds and ages, and we’re taking steps to meet that commitment. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply for this role, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

You can learn more about The Texas Tribune here.

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