Journalist, BBC Sport Online

Package Description

Job Reference: 15116
Band: C
Salary: £28,000 - £38,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
Contract type: 3 x Continuing
Location: Office Base is MediaCity, Salford. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working.

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits - We offer a negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.

Freelancers are eligible to apply for an internal role if they are on a Worker Contract and they have worked continuously for 6 months. If they have worked for less than 6 months continuously or have a break of 3 weeks or more between engagements, they must seek Divisional HR approval to apply for an internal role prior to submitting an application.

If they are unsure which contract they are on, they can speak to their booker or the HR BP, however if it helps - both a PAYE freelance or Modus Gross contract is considered a Worker contract and covered by the Worker terms found here.

Job Introduction

Do you want to help BBC Sport deliver the biggest sporting events and sports news stories to digital audiences?

We require written journalists to help us deliver live text pages and news around key events to our market leading audience. These roles will be based in Salford, at our production centre.

You’ll need to able to deliver fast, accurate news writing and entertaining and compelling live pages.

If that sounds like you then we invite you to apply and join BBC Sport at the heart of the world’s major sporting events and stories.

Our teams help make sure that every day our audiences are served with all the best content. It’s an exciting place to be!

Main Responsibilities

Responsibilities would include some of the following:

• Being part of a team of writers and digital content makers who spot great stories and generate original journalism
• Breaking quick, accurate, and engaging written news stories under pressure and to a high standard
• Helping to make our coverage of events even more engaging through creative storytelling on a variety of platforms
• Working on live sporting events – helping produce our industry leading live texts, reports, news and features
• Suggesting creative content ideas to News Editors for on the day commissions reacting to the day’s news agenda or big social media talking points to inform and entertain our audience.
• Producing concise content or short reports from agency copy or other material from BBC departments and programmes
• Being receptive to feedback and good at building positive working relationships with peers

Shift work including evening and weekend are also features of this role.

Are you the right candidate?

We would love to hear from you if you have experience in some or all of the following:

• You should be able to write quickly, accurately and succinctly as well as experience of how to find and generate stories for a digital audience
• Sound editorial judgement and the ability to make quick decisions under pressure
• A passion for the stories that are generated by sport, not only by the stars but underserved members of society.
• Engaged with social media, with an understanding of what sports fans are talking about and what they want to read.
• Interested with the current news and sport news agenda and have proven editorial judgement.
• A good understanding of how to optimise storytelling for mobile phones.
• Mindset is important: we want enthusiasm, ideas and creativity coupled with good communication and organisational skills.
• Demonstrate a commitment to improving diversity in the BBC and understand how individual differences can benefit the workplace and output.
• We would also be interested to hear of any specialist sporting knowledge and interest.
• Able to build and maintain effective working relationships with a range of people.

This is not an entry level role, we're looking for candidates with experience within the area, please review the criteria for the role before applying.

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours here.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here.