Are you a skilled wordsmith, adept at crafting clear and memorable copy?
Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a talented and experienced English-language Copy Editor to join our Engagement team.
As a Copy Editor at CfA, you will bring with you a wealth of editorial experience and impeccable proofreading skills. You will have the chance to collaborate with a diverse team from around the world, utilising digital collaboration tools to create impactful content for our global audience and international partners.
To excel in this role, candidates must have a proven track record of professional sub-editing within a journalistic or communications environment, coupled with exceptional English language writing skills. Knowledge of technological innovation and digital activism/democracy will be an added advantage.
The successful candidate will join CfA’s Engagement team, which is responsible for building public engagement with the civic technologies and digital journalism created by our teams in 22 African countries.
Working with a multinational and multilingual team, you will leverage digital collaboration tools to create content for a global audience and international media partners.
Required: minimum requirements include:
- Minimum of 5 years of copy-editing experience in a fast-paced newsroom or the digital journalism space.
- Excellent knowledge of grammar and proper compositional practices, to aid in rewriting and proofreading often complex copy.
- Excellent explanatory writing and editing skills, with a strong command of English.
- Rigorous research skills, an obsessive commitment to accuracy, and attention to detail to verify information on diverse topics.
- The ability to work fast, creatively, and accurately under pressure to deliver content that is credible, consistent and always factually correct.
- Excellent knowledge of current affairs, particularly in the civic-tech space, coupled with critical-thinking skills.
- Strong organisational and decision-making skills.
- Experience developing style guides and training inhouse teams on how to apply it to their work
- The ability to communicate and work effectively with multicultural – and multilingual – writers, editors, designers, illustrators, video producers and project team members who work remotely and in different time zones.
- Proficiency in adapting writing styles to cater for various audiences, channels, and formats.
- Demonstrable ability to improve the meaning and clarity of copy through correct grammar, consistency of voice, tone and terminology, factual accuracy, logical sentence and document structure, and readability of the final product.
- Track record of copy editing various content types, such as blogs, social media content, investigative reports, and presentations.
- The ability to work creatively and in a remote fast-paced deadline-driven environment to deliver content that is credible, consistent and always factually correct.
- Effective communicative and collaborative skills with multicultural writers, editors, and project team members who work remotely and in different time zones.
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:
- A keen understanding of how to integrate data into compelling storytelling.
- Experience in transforming traditional journalism into visual storytelling, including how to most effectively integrate social video and/or infographics.
- Experience in using digital collaboration tools, including Slack, Google Drive, and Trello to manage editorial workflows.
Language and Location Requirements:
- Location: Remote
- Languages: English
- Preferred but not required: Arabic, French, Swahili, or other major African languages.
About the Role:
The successful candidate will be part of CfA’s Engagement team, responsible for managing our public audience, curating platforms, communications, and brand. The team strives to enhance CfA’s reputation and amplify thought leadership through compelling multimedia storytelling.
You will work primarily with the Engagement team and, from time to time, with other CfA teams and/or partners to create compelling content on our projects. Your main responsibility will be editing content from various sources, ensuring technical accuracy, adherence to our style and voice, and meeting the needs of our team and partners in the development and civic technology sectors. The content will be published on CfA’s platforms and syndicated with media partners.
We expect you to have strong news judgement and a comprehensive understanding of different writing styles and topics relevant to a leading civic technology organisation. You will work alongside a team of editorial experts, including copywriters, researchers, writers, data analysts, designers, and social media strategists.
Responsibilities: Your daily responsibilities will include:
- Copy/sub-edit (i.e., correcting format, grammar, syntax, spelling, and style) all content.
- Verify facts and statistics using reputable reference sources.
- Proofread and revise content for logical flow, clarity, consistency and conciseness.
- Ensure that documents are well structured and well formatted.
- Guide other members of staff on how to improve their rough drafts to reduce editing further down the line.
- Help in developing our in-house style guide and ensuring content adheres to the guide.
What We Offer:
- A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
- Medical insurance cover, underwritten by a remote-first provider to ensure cover wherever you are
- A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, occasional international travel, and generous vacation benefits.
- Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
- A chance to shine on a global stage, writing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.
How to apply:
Please fill in this form by 12 April 2024.
About Us:
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 100 staff in 21 countries, who build digital democracy solutions that are intended to give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
This includes building infrastructure such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and largest open source civic software portal, commons.AFRICA, as well as the largest repository of investigative document-based evidence, source.AFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network that gives citizens their own ‘eyes in the sky’, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in 12 African countries, and the sensors.AFRICA remote-sensing citizen science initiative to combat air/water pollution.