Vice President, Growth Investments

The American Journalism Project (AJP) is seeking a Vice President, Growth Investments to join our Growth Investments team to steward our relationships with the nonprofit news organizations in which AJP is investing growth capital while building their capacity and ability to grow their revenue and impact. You will steward AJP’s return on our investments, participating in grantmaking due diligence, leading one-to-one venture support and business coaching with our grantees, and contributing to AJP’s efforts to partner with our grantees to build a movement for local news in their markets.

This is a unique opportunity to join a growing, national movement to rebuild local news in communities across the country in a way that allows these organizations to better serve the public, while being sustainable and independent.

Who we are

We’re a small but entrepreneurial team working to re-shape the future of local news in our country. We’re passionate about journalism, civic engagement, and how local news plays a unique role in shaping our democracy. We help build and grow sustainable local news organizations all over the country — through financial investment, venture support, and movement building — that are governed by, sustained by, and look like the public they serve. Learn about our grantees.

AJP has raised over $200 million for the cause so far, and aims to catalyze enough investment in nonprofit local news to create thriving, equitable, public service-oriented newsrooms that increase civic engagement and make communities work better for their residents.

Our team is deeply connected to our mission and supportive of each others’ goals and overall well-being. We aim to be an organization where everyone feels heard, respected, and valued. We are an entirely remote, distributed team and strive to maintain a healthy, fun, and productive workplace, working alongside smart, energetic colleagues who enjoy one another and the work. Meet our full team.

Our values

• Local First: We know that local journalism must serve and be led by local communities. We make a practice of listening to, making decisions with — not for — those communities, and connecting them to find strength in each other.
• Bold Leadership: We understand the severe economic challenge facing local news and thus democracy, and we embrace a sense of possibility with courage, urgency, and perseverance.
• Constant Learning: We recognize the unknown in front of us. Therefore, we operate with humility and a commitment to continuous improvement and collaboration.
• Commitment to Equity: We commit to creating a better, more diverse, and more inclusive news media that advances human and civil rights. We actively fight against injustice and racism, and that starts with doing the work ourselves.
• Integrity: We accept the responsibility of earning trust every day. We operate with honesty, transparency, dignity, and respect, and without allegiance to party, ideology, profit, or power.

Your team

The Growth Investments team is committed to strengthening the nonprofit news sector across the country. We constantly search for excellent nonprofit news organizations across the United States who have the potential to grow in scale and impact in their communities, invest capital in those organizations targeted at supporting their revenue growth, and coach and support those grantees to maximize their revenue potential. Our goal is to set all our grantees on a path to become best-in-class local nonprofit institutions with the sustainable resources to more adequately meet the information needs of their communities. This role will report to the Senior Vice President, Growth Investments.

The position

The VP, Growth Investments is a critical role at AJP that leads our work in ensuring their portfolio of organizations are on track to meet ambitious growth targets and deliver more impact for their communities. This role is a coach, an orchestrator, a steward and a movement builder. You will be charged with collaborating on the selection of grantees; providing excellent coaching, support and leadership development to executive leaders in their portfolio of grantees; and ensuring we are building community, insights and resources from across our grantee portfolio to inform the broader field. You will also work directly with grantees on building the philanthropic movement for local news in their markets and will be accountable for ensuring that grantees meet their revenue goals while achieving their vision for impact.

Specific responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Leading regular, ongoing and strategic conversations with executives at our grantee organizations about maximizing their organizational assets and overcoming challenges to growth, including staffing, organizational structure and culture, fundraising, earned revenue, board leadership, and local movement building
• Serving as the primary co-conspirator for growth plans by collaborating on strategic plans to grow revenue by millions of dollars for news organizations in your portfolio
• Designing strong support plans that leverage the AJP staff of specialists/experts (including yourself), consultants, peer organizations, and others to provide best in class support for grantees in one to one or group settings, virtually or in person
• Working with other members of the Growth Investments team to build community across content areas and design learning experiences alongside our Portfolio Learning team to advance grantees’ knowledge and skills
• Actively networking in the local journalism ecosystem, building external relationships and a pipeline of current and future grantees, and pursuing strategic opportunities for new growth investments
• Stewarding the leadership of new grantee organizations into our portfolio in a way that meets all technical requirements, builds a trusting relationship, and sets clear expectations for both the grantee and AJP
• Collecting and amplifying examples, stories and learning from your grantee portfolio that will benefit the larger grantee portfolio
• Developing resources either by yourself or collaboratively with other experts

Background & skills

We know not all strong candidates will have all the skills we list. That’s OK. Research shows that women and people of color are less likely to apply for a position if they don’t meet every skill listed. At the American Journalism Project we are committed to creating a better, more diverse, and more inclusive news ecosystem, and that starts with doing the work ourselves. So if your past experience doesn’t align perfectly, but you know this is the role for you – please tell us!

An ideal candidate will have…

• Experience diagnosing opportunities and challenges to organizational growth and creating plans to maximize growth potential.
• Experience in working in or with nonprofit news organizations and a track record of finding and delivering sustained financial resources for those organizations.
• An understanding and fluency in donor relationships from both sides of the donor/recipient relationship is strongly preferable, but not required.
• A depth of understanding of organizational development, growth planning and/or continuous improvement techniques.
• Leadership experience in the context of either a news organization or a nonprofit organization is required; management coaching experience is preferable.
• Executive presence and the ability to influence at all levels of an organization.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to synthesize large amounts of information and clearly communicate key insights, with a strong grasp of business concepts and numbers; must be a persuasive communicator.
• An understanding of the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion in workplaces, newsrooms, and coverage; willingness to learn and coach others through operationalizing equity and inclusion.
• Meticulous attention to detail and accuracy in documentation.

This role is a fit if you are…

• Excited about gaining experience growing sustainable news organizations, while putting your unique skills and experience to impactful use.
• Enjoy the act of coaching leaders to achieve ambitious scale targets.
• Enthusiastic about tackling challenges in a fast-paced startup environment while focusing on continuous experimentation and shepherding projects to completion that help news organizations succeed.
• Willing to think outside the box to solve problems for which there are not always blueprints for solutions.
• Highly empathetic; you have an affinity for collaborative work, love for mentoring and inspiring others, and doing whatever it takes to get them to successful outcomes.
• Accustomed to working in environments where feedback is liberally given and taken.
• Intellectually curious, a strategic thinker and an innovative problem-solver, including a proven ability to create and manage organizational change.
• A person with strong personal responsibility and accountability, results-oriented, adaptable, skilled at situational management (including being able to manage up, laterally, and down).
• Ready to travel as needed but also excited to work for a remote organization (we are a fully virtual team; however, we estimate this person would need to travel approximately 6-10 times a year).
• A person with passion for making the country a better, more equitable and just place for its residents by helping to build a new local news ecosystem across the U.S.

Compensation & benefits

Our total compensation package is competitive in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, and we are committed to supporting our team with what they need to show up every day, ready to bolster the local press our democracy deserves.

We benchmark our salaries against similar organizations, and use a scale that considers job complexity and magnitude of responsibility to determine role levels and corresponding base salaries, as well as offer regular opportunities for salary increases. The salary range for this position is $170,965 – $188,062. Read about our benefits here.