Acting health editor (maternity cover)

Job title: Acting health editor (maternity cover)

Salary: £41,400 - £56,129 pro-rata per annum 

Location: Remote first within the UK, with an office available in Central London and regular monthly team meetings in the office.

Reporting to: Editor

Employment type: Fixed term for 9-12 months

We are happy to talk about flexible working.

Application closing date: 10am Monday 25 November 2024

Introduction to the role

Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact-checking organisation, is recruiting an acting health editor to cover a period of maternity leave.

Health misinformation can cause direct damage to people’s health, put communities at risk and impact choices about whether to seek treatment. This is an exciting opportunity to lead our health fact-checking team within the organisation and combat bad information that could put lives at risk. 

Full Fact fights bad information. Our team of independent fact checkers, technologists and campaigners works to find, expose and counter it. You will shape and develop fact-checking that already gets thousands of media pick-ups each year, reaches millions of readers, and has real impact tackling the harm caused by misleading information.

You will use your skills to help make public debate more trustworthy. Our health fact checking has seen NHS England correct information about measles vaccine coverage and the Office for National Statistics change the way it presents data on deaths due to flu or pneumonia, while our fact checking during the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to Full Fact being awarded the President's medal by the British Academy.

This is a job for someone who wants to both grow an audience and make a difference, working with the support of our Editor and Full Fact’s wider team including communications, policy and artificial intelligence specialists.

If you are interested in applying but not sure you have all the skills, please do apply. We are open both to supporting learning on the job and to rearranging tasks within the team to suit the skillsets of the best applicant

Job definition

Your job is to lead our work combatting health misinformation. You will lead a team of three health fact checkers (two health policy journalists and a clinical fact checker) to cover all aspects of health misinformation circulating in the UK.

You will need to work fast, and make quick, confident and smart decisions on the health stories that matter as we seek to fact check the misinformation identified by our monitoring. You will also need to prioritise ruthlessly, ensuring we focus our limited resources on the stories where we can really make a difference.

You will organise our health monitoring, commission and edit fact checks to tight deadlines, and work with colleagues from across Full Fact to ensure we identify and tackle underlying solvable problems. 

We are ideally looking for candidates with significant experience as an editor or journalist, and preferably with some knowledge of either health policy or clinical information, but prior fact-checking experience is not necessary.

You will need to be able to quickly master and explain tricky, nuanced topics in clear, concise copy – and must have an eye for a story. You’ll also need to be able to manage, motivate and mentor a small team of dedicated journalists.

Outcomes

• Leading Full Fact’s fact checking work on health, including health policy and medical misinformation
• Running the health team within editorial (with line management responsibility for three fact checkers)
• Assigning work on health fact checking, setting deadlines and ensuring they are hit
• Reviewing and signing off health fact checks and other content, ensuring everything we publish is of a high standard and escalating to the editor or chief executive where needed
• Overseeing the health fact checking team’s production process, including tracking our workflow day-to-day, ensuring we hit publication targets and updating on progress daily
• Leading our day-to-day health monitoring process to an agreed plan, to ensure we are covering a balanced range of sources, including politicians, the mainstream media and social media
• Helping edit other fact checks and editorial content, including from our politics and news & online teams
• Working closely with other teams within Full Fact to identify where we can take action, for example by asking for corrections to be made or standards improved
• Representing Full Fact in the media, as required
• Leading Full Fact’s engagement with the health sector, and engaging with external third parties to further the work of Full Fact and share expertise
• Working on other longer-term or strategic projects
• Evaluating and reporting on our work to combat health misinformation

What we are looking for from you

Political impartiality and sensitivity:

• You are committed to the political neutrality of our work and have a good understanding of impartiality (please see the rules on our website).
• Understanding of public debate in the UK and sensitivity to the political context we work in.

Job skills/competencies

• Political impartiality and sensitivity
• Strong research, writing and editing skills
• Strong understanding of public debate in the UK and sensitivity to the political context Full Fact works in
• Good communication skills, and a track record of communicating with a non-specialist audience in any format
• An understanding of Full Fact’s styles and principles, and an ability to translate this into all of the work produced by the editorial team through writing and reviewing
• An ability to understand and master new topics rapidly
• Significant experience working in journalism or a related field with demonstrable editing experience
• Understanding of digital channels, audiences and formats
• Ideally - good understanding of health policy and/or clinical topics
• Ideally - line management experience

What we offer

• Starting salary of £41,400 - £56,129 pro-rata per annum depending on experience.
• Workplace pension.
• Generous holidays - 25 days' holiday pro rata plus bank holidays. In addition, we close the office and stop working for a period between Christmas and New Year. Day off for moving home.
• Comfortable, centrally located London office with good transport links.
• Employee Assistance Programme.

How to apply

Upload your CV and cover letter using the link below by 10am on Monday 25 November.

Our recruitment platform will remove identifying details such as email addresses to allow us to sift applications anonymously

Before applying, please read the requirements we place on staff to protect Full Fact’s independence and non-partisanship https://fullfact.org/get-involved/jobs/#standards 

How the application process will work

We want to see you at your best to understand your strengths and the contribution you could make at Full Fact with strong support, including for your learning and development.

We also want to make sure that we use your time well during this process and don’t ask for more from you than we need to. We will make any reasonable adjustments we need to make to this process to help ensure you can perform at your best. For more information about this before applying, please contact jobs@fullfact.org.

The interview panel will be Steve Nowottny (editor) and Claire Milne (health editor) and Grace Rahman (news and online editor).

The process starts off with an anonymised covering letter and CV. This will be read by at least two people to produce a shortlist for interview.

The first-round interviews will be a phone (not video) interview, lasting no more than half an hour, at a time that is convenient for you. We will record it so at least two people can review each interview to decide who we invite back for the second round. The recordings will be deleted at the end of the process.

The second round will include a structured interview and a timed task which assumes no prior knowledge. The task can be completed prior to the interview, at a time that most suits you.

The interview will be with the full panel by video and last no more than an hour. We will tell you everything you need to know to prepare, including anything we’d recommend reading in advance.