Audience Growth & Monetization Lead, Specialized Support Team

Job Description

The American Journalism Project (AJP) is seeking an Audience Growth & Monetization Lead to join our Knight Resiliency Lab. This role will own and implement our strategy for helping portfolio organizations drive toward product-market fit by growing their audiences, deepening loyalty, and converting their value into sustainable reader revenue and sponsorships.

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 $240 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, and 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

AJP’s Growth Investments team is committed to strengthening the nonprofit news sector across the country. We continuously search for excellent nonprofit news organizations that have the potential to grow in scale and impact in their communities, invest capital in those organizations targeted at supporting their growth, and coach and support those grantees to maximize their revenue potential. Our goal is to set all the organizations in our portfolio 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 be a part of the Knight Resiliency Lab, an initiative within our Growth Investments work, and report to the Senior Vice President, Specialized Support.

The position

The Audience Growth & Monetization Lead will be a trusted thought partner to our portfolio’s audience teams and the AJP Program Team, bringing strategic acumen about where the industry is going and what successful news organizations must do to identify, engage, and monetize audiences. They will work with newsroom and business leaders on both strategy and tactics, including top-of-funnel growth, SEO/AEO, newsletter strategies, reader revenue, earned revenue, and other related disciplines.

This person will also be charged with reviewing portfolio-wide analytics, translating emerging trends and performance insights into actionable guidance, and building and deploying the expert support needed to help organizations grow loyalty, strengthen revenue, and build thriving media companies. As the portfolio grows, they will help shape AJP’s specialized support strategy, coach newsroom and business leaders, and build partnerships that advance innovative, sustainable audience growth models.

Specific responsibilities include but are not limited to:

Lead support delivery and partnerships  for audience growth and monetization

• Assess portfolio maturity and identify priority gaps and opportunities by working closely with portfolio organizations and our broader program team and develop interventions to advance the progress of individual grantees or groups. 
• Drive portfolio and staff understanding of excellence—leading briefings, showcasing emerging practices, and supporting staff-wide learning around audience growth and monetization.
• Manage and expand a high-quality network of specialist contractors, coaches, and vendors across these fields, in addition to other disciplines as needs arise
• Define scopes of work, expectations, and success metrics for all expert engagements and actively manage their work to ensure consistency, relevance, and quality across partner-led support experiences.
• Provide targeted, hands-on coaching to priority organizations as a strategic advisor and thought partner.
• Collaborate with the broader program team to align specialist support with organizational strategy and outcomes.

Manage execution of insights and learning experiences

• Develop strong insights around innovations in nonprofit local news operations, audience development and monetization that can be leveraged by news organizations, along with common barriers to implementation
• Build a community of subject matter experts across each of your domains in the portfolio to collaborate, share insights, pressure-test ideas, and experiment together.
• Partner with the Portfolio Learning team to design and manage accelerators, workshops, playbooks and trainings that build core competencies across the portfolio.

Cultivate relationships & partnerships

• Actively network in the local journalism ecosystem and adjacent fields, building external relationships to ensure AJP is learning from across industries
• Leverage the national scale of AJP to develop partnerships that generate new resources or reduced costs for our portfolio of news organization’s finance and operations teams

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 $175,239-192,763. Read about our benefits here.

Job Requirements

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…

• Demonstrated ability to design and lead effective support strategies for media organizations, rooted in real needs, long-term sustainability, and mission alignment.
• Senior leadership experience with direct ownership of audience growth, revenue, or both within a newsroom, media organization including a deep understanding of audience development and monetization strategies.
• A strong track record of helping organizations adopt new practices, tools, or technologies—working through external experts to drive practical, measurable impact.
• Deep experience guiding complex, expert-led work and special projects, including scoping ambiguous problems, setting priorities and workplans, using data and feedback to assess progress, and iterating based on results.
• Experience leading experts, coaches and senior leaders, with the ability to develop, persuade, motivate, and influence across levels and disciplines.
• Experience putting together partnerships and negotiating clear and favorable terms that accomplish clear goals.
• Experience assessing team capabilities and guiding cross functional teams through growth and change.
• Experience creating templates, frameworks, and other tools that help others learn and implement strong audience and revenue best practices.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear insights and actionable recommendations.
• Strong attention to detail and a commitment to high-quality documentation and analysis.
• A deep appreciation for the role of equity in newsroom development and operations, and a willingness to coach others on turning those values into practice.

What to expect in the hiring process

Our approach to hiring is to create a consistent and transparent process for all candidates. We hope to fill this role as soon as possible, though the hiring process can typically take from a few weeks to several months. We will do our best to communicate with you about timing expectations throughout the process. Please note, every application is reviewed by at least one member of our team, if not more, and we do not use AI or automated tools to screen candidates.

Candidates who advance to later rounds of this process can expect multiple interviews with members of our hiring committee. Semi-finalists will be asked to complete a technical hiring exercise designed to help us understand your thinking and approach to the role, and you will be offered an optional prep session to ask any questions that will help you put your best foot forward in this process. We aim to truly get to know you, to help you fully understand the role you’re applying for, and to get to know your prospective team.

Please submit an application through our portal. Download the full job description here. If you have any questions, please feel free to email careers@theajp.org with “Audience Growth & Monetization Lead” in the subject line.

Information Session

We hosted an information session on Zoom on Tuesday, May 5. Watch a recording of the session here.

The American Journalism Project is dedicated to equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees. AJP encourages people of all races, colors, national origins, ancestries, creeds, religions, genders, ages, disabilities, veteran status, sexual orientations, and marital statuses to apply. 

AJP complies with federal and state disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact careers@theajp.org. 

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