Senior Newsletter Editor, Capital Daily

When Overstory launched in 2021, we did so with the goal of making communities stronger through phenomenal storytelling, high quality reporting, and engaging and thought-provoking content. 

We started with one publication in Victoria, BC, and today have a dozen around Canada along with 50 full-time staff – and have no plans of slowing down. Our goal is to create, acquire, and build over 50 community publications over the next couple years, and we need help bringing that vision to reality.

The opportunity:

We're looking for an experienced, engaging, and quality-driven senior newsletter editor to lead Capital Daily, our community-focused daily newsletter in Victoria, BC. Reporting to the managing editor, this is a full-time opportunity that will require some weekend work.

The senior newsletter editor will lead the newsletter team (consisting of one other full-time newsletter editor), and work with Capital Daily’s reporters to plan, write, edit, and publish the most relevant, engaging, and conversational stories that give local residents a daily briefing of what’s going on in Victoria—whether they have five or 45 minutes.

The senior newsletter editor will produce an indispensable, must-read local briefing that engages our audience, provides readers with information they need to understand their community, their neighbours, and how to connect to both. 

The Capital Daily newsletter is the heart of the Capital Daily brand and the senior newsletter editor must ensure its relevance by trying new things, proactively reacting to metrics and audience behaviour, and obsessing about effective storytelling in the email newsletter platform. Your autonomy, creativity and experience means being empowered to craft products, stories, and schedules that allow for ambitious journalism, while creating the systems to follow through with the ideas that will help readers be the most educated and engaged citizens of your city. All while spreading the word to their community not yet subscribed.

This is a remote position based in Victoria, BC.

About you:

• You love newsletters and have written one newsletter before, even if it’s just internal or a passion project.
• You have a ton of writing and editing experience with online publications. A little copywriting and marketing experience is a big plus.
• You subscribe to and enjoy reading newsletters, appreciating their audience engagement nuance and tactics.
• You know how to write in a way that gets readers past the headline—a sense of humour and irreverence is a definite asset.
• You know Greater Victoria and the South Island inside and out and have an understanding of the local arts, culture, business, and media landscape.
• You are able to critically analyze, contextualize, and question information and opinions—and know the difference between them.
• You bring a growth mindset, with a commitment to continuous improvement.
• You have excellent communication, organizational, and people leadership skills.
• You know how to use tools like Slack, ActiveCampaign (or another email platform like MailChimp or Substack), ClickUp (or another task management platform like Asana), and G Suite.
• You're able to meet deadlines and handle multiple projects at a time.
• You ideally have supported, worked in, or managed a newsroom before.
• You are highly organized and can build and share the systems to help others be as well.
• You have meticulous attention to detail and can spot the difference between an n-dash and an m-dash (and use it based on the accepted style guide).

In this role you'll have the opportunity to:

• Oversee production and publishing of the daily newsletter, ensuring that stories are told accurately, engagingly and in our house style.
• Oversee and evolve the newsletter’s tone of voice.
• Stay up to date with the latest newsletter trends—you think in click rates and optimization best practices.
• Monitor and optimize performance of the newsletter to meet subscriber, engagement, and growth targets.
• Maintain a detailed long- and short-term content calendar to keep track of what’s being published each week, as well as longer stories months out.
• Write, edit, publish website content as needed.
• Participate in daily story meetings to help determine who on the editorial team will be writing main stories for the newsletter and what topics will be covered each day, documenting editorial deliverables daily, weekly and monthly via the editorial calendar.
• Review daily audience engagement and performance metrics, sharing insights with the team and utilizing the data to optimize future newsletters.
• Work with the social media editor to help promote daily newsletter and web stories.
• Manage the Capital Daily inbox and respond to emails from readers; consulting with the managing editor when needed.
• Brainstorm ideas for other types of content to be included in the newsletter, such as contests, job boards, events, etc.
• Build trust with our audience through quality work.
• Follow journalistic standards and practices as laid out by CAJ and the Trust Project.

Perks of working with us:

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Full-time position with a competitive compensation package.
• Flexible, fully remote work hours.
• Generous vacation and PTO policy.
• A commitment to an open, inclusive, and diverse work culture.

Who we are:

Overstory Media Group is an independent media company that delivers high-quality, fact-based journalism and storytelling to the communities we serve. At Overstory our goal is to empower communities – connected by geography, industry, or interest – with information delivered by the people within them.

We do this by identifying journalists, creators, and existing brands who share in this belief and provide tools, resources, and financial support to help them create in their communities.

Today we have over a dozen community brands across Canada under our umbrella. Some of the community outlets we're building including Capital Daily, Vancouver Tech Journal, Burnaby Beacon, and Fraser Valley Current.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Our mission as a company is to provide an equal opportunity that caters to inclusion and diversity within the workplace and extend our services within the community as a brand. We recognize and value individual differences and are committed to upholding this value to mirror the diversity within our country.

If you are interested in the position then please press 'Apply' and if you have any inquiries please email careers@overstorymedia.com.