Updated on March 1, 2023
Rent Responsibly is a community building and education platform for local short-term and vacation rental alliances. Our tools and alliance management services equip local leaders to build successful, self-sustaining organizations of owners, hosts, property managers, and all other stakeholders. We make it easy for leaders and members to connect, collaborate, solve common challenges, advocate for themselves, steward their communities, and rent responsibly.
Rent Responsibly is hiring a freelance journalist to cover regulatory news with up to four articles per month. These articles will:
- Primarily cover news from regulatory discussions or actions in local markets (like this), as well as state, regional or national trends (like this).
- Serve a primary audience of professional vacation rental management companies and a secondary audience of all short-term rental operator types and adjacent businesses.
- Be around 800 words long, though occasional pieces may be longer.
- Be published on a vacation rental property management industry news website as well as RentResponsibly.org.
- Be mostly bylined by the author as a journalist for Rent Responsibly with occasional pieces ghostwritten or written in collaboration with others.
- Have topics jointly identified by the writer and Rent Responsibly COO Alexa Nota, who will serve as editor for this role.
The ideal candidate will also produce a video summary of select articles using clips from the recorded interviews, stock b-roll and text.
Rent Responsibly will provide a Rent Responsibly email address, Zoom Meetings license, access to Otter.ai for transcription and access to Lumen5 for video creation.
Primary Duties:
- Conduct all research and necessary interviews. You will be responsible for sourcing leads, but Rent Responsibly staff will often be able to connect you with sources in our network.
- Research subjects and topics thoroughly.
- Draft well-written, fact-checked, and expertly-proofed articles.
- Record interviews and submit recordings for potential future use in multimedia pieces.
- Submit all articles and video summaries on deadline.
Qualifications:
- You love to write. It’s how you best express yourself, and your written communication is second to none. You naturally make complex topics simple, and you can balance journalistic integrity with engaging storytelling.
- You have professional experience in written journalism – bonus points for professional experience in both news and feature writing.
- You enjoy interviewing people for stories and don’t shy away from digging for answers or adjusting your story plan on the fly.
- You get to know your audiences and can adapt your writing style to meet them where they are.
- You have supreme attention to detail.
- You love finding the right word or phrase, but you don’t let perfection get in the way of producing quality work on deadline.
- You are self-driven and adept at managing your time. You can juggle projects and shuffle priorities flexibly with little oversight.
- You are versed in Chicago Style.
- You have at least a basic understanding of how laws are made at the local and state levels.
Bonus Points:
- Experience with basic video editing
- Experience covering or working directly in the short-term and vacation rental industry
- Experience covering the policymaking process
Rates:
The volume of articles will most often range from two to four articles per month and will be about 800 words on average. Occasionally, longer-form pieces will be requested.
- 600-1000 words: $200
- 1001-1500 words: $250
- 1501-2000 words: $300
+ Video summaries (up to 2 minutes) with select pre-determined articles: $60/video
To Apply:
Email to our COO at hiring [at] rentresponsibly.org with:
- A brief explanation why your experience, skills, and qualities make you a good fit
- A brief summary of your resume
- Links to three samples of published work most relevant to this contract
Form letters will be ignored. All genuine applicants will receive a response.
Rent Responsibly is an Equal Opportunity Employer
We believe in tables where everyone has a seat and a voice. That starts with us.
Rent Responsibly is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace, and we encourage people of all backgrounds to apply. Your race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression do not matter to us, only your merit, passion and kindness.
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