Your New Role...
CNN's global Visuals team is growing, and we're looking for an interdisciplinary journalist with deep experience in cartography, geospatial analysis and visual storytelling. This editor will produce essential, creative and ambitious journalism across breaking news, daily coverage and enterprise projects, with a particular emphasis on maps and location-based storytelling.
As a member of the global Visuals team, you will work closely with editors, reporters, designers and developers across CNN to contextualize the news and help audiences understand the most important stories of the day. You will source and analyze geospatial data, identify opportunities for visual coverage and create clear, compelling maps and graphics across a wide range of topics, including elections, international conflict, climate, culture, business and policy.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role. The ideal candidate is a strong journalist and visual thinker who can move quickly during breaking news while also developing more ambitious mapping projects over time. This role is intended to strengthen CNN's late-day and evening visual coverage and will ideally be based on the West Coast or work an East Coast schedule that includes evening hours.
Your Role Accountabilities...
- Produce clear, accurate and engaging maps, charts and graphics for breaking news, daily coverage and medium- to long-term enterprise projects.
- Identify and pitch opportunities for map-driven, visual and data-led storytelling tied to the news cycle.
- Source, clean, analyze and interpret geospatial datasets from public records, APIs, satellite imagery and other sources.
- Develop original reporting and analysis that helps audiences understand where events are happening, how places are changing and why geography matters to a story.
- Work closely with reporters, editors, designers and developers to integrate maps and visual storytelling into CNN's coverage.
- Contribute to CNN's elections coverage by working with election results, geographic and demographic datasets to produce accurate, clear and compelling maps and visual analysis.
- Contribute to live and planned coverage of major news events, including elections, international conflicts, extreme weather and other breaking stories.
- Adapt visual approaches for different devices, platforms and distribution needs, including home screens and off-platform storytelling.
- Experiment with emerging tools and formats, including interactive mapping, satellite imagery, 3D terrain, WebGL and other forms of geospatial storytelling.
Qualifications & Experience... - At least 7 years of experience in a newsroom or comparable data visualization, cartography or visual journalism environment.
- A strong portfolio of published map-driven journalism, including work produced on deadline and more ambitious enterprise projects.
- Advanced experience with geospatial analysis and modern mapping tools such as QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, MapLibre, D3.js or similar platforms.
- Experience working with elections data, electoral geography or political mapping - including familiarity with results data, district boundaries and demographic datasets - is strongly preferred.
- Strong editorial judgment, attention to detail and commitment to accuracy.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across desks, disciplines and time zones.
- Ability to source, clean and analyze geospatial data and translate complex findings into clear, accessible visuals.
- Help adapt visual stories and graphics for home screens, apps and off-platform distribution.
- Experience using some combination of Illustrator, ai2html, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, R, SQL, Excel and Git or the command line.
- Experience balancing quick-turn breaking news graphics with medium- and long-term projects.
- Curiosity and openness to experimenting with new techniques, tools and storytelling formats.
If you don't have every one of these skills, that's OK. We want to hear from candidates who are passionate about this work and eager to bring their unique perspective and experience to the role.
How We Get Things Done...This last bit is probably the most important! Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/ along with some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.
