Your New Role...
CNN's global Visuals team is seeking a senior editor to help lead our visual journalism during critical late-day and evening news hours. This is an editorial leadership and people-management role for an experienced visual journalist who can guide breaking news coverage, shape ambitious enterprise projects and help teams produce clear, accurate and distinctive storytelling across formats.
This editor will work closely with CNN's news desks and with designers, data journalists, developers, reporters and other editors across the global Visuals team. You will identify the strongest visual opportunities across the news cycle, assign and edit work, oversee story design and help ensure that CNN's visual journalism is serving audiences with clarity, creativity and urgency.
The ideal candidate is an excellent editor and calm newsroom leader who can move easily between a breaking news situation, a visual story pitch, a line edit, a design review and a conversation about a team member's development. This role is intended to strengthen CNN's late-day and evening coverage and will ideally be based on the West Coast or work an East Coast schedule that includes evening hours.
Your Role Accountabilities...
- Set editorial priorities for the Visuals team during late-day and evening news hours, ensuring strong communication and handoffs across time zones.
- Anticipate breaking news coverage needs and lead visual responses across a wide variety of scenarios.
- Assign and edit graphics, maps, visual stories, interactives, annotations and other formats for breaking news, daily coverage and medium- to long-term enterprise projects.
- Edit visual and data-driven stories, including both graphics and text, ensuring clear framing, strong reporting and journalism-first execution.
- Review story structure, design, data analysis, visualizations and interactive storytelling to ensure they meet rigorous editorial and design standards.
- Identify visual opportunities across CNN's coverage and work proactively with editors and reporters on other desks to develop strong approaches.
- Lead major projects in partnership with multiple teams and stakeholders, establishing clear expectations, timelines and decision-making processes.
- Collaborate with platform and distribution teams to strengthen the framing and packaging of visual stories across home screens, apps and off-platform channels.
- Maintain an organized view of assignments, priorities and handoffs for global coverage.
- Manage, mentor and support a group of visual journalists, providing thoughtful feedback and helping teammates develop their skills and careers.
- Refine workflows, document processes and contribute to a collaborative culture of experimentation and skill-sharing.
- Apply audience insights to help shape story ideas, formats and approaches that resonate with and serve CNN's audiences.
Qualifications & Experience... - At least 7 years of experience in a newsroom or comparable editorial environment, including experience editing visual or data-driven journalism.
- Experience managing visual journalists and supporting their day-to-day work, long-term development and career growth.
- Impeccable news judgment and the ability to lead calmly and decisively during breaking news.
- A proven ability to edit both visual storytelling and text, from early framing and reporting through final publication.
- Strong visual judgment and experience reviewing story design, data visualization, interactives, maps and other graphics formats.
- A track record of identifying strong story ideas and pushing storytelling beyond obvious or incremental approaches.
- A strong representative of the Visuals team within a wider organization: you build positive cross-team relationships and champion visual journalism as essential to coverage.
- Experience editing or leading elections coverage, including familiarity with election results, political data and map-driven storytelling, is strongly preferred.
- Excellent communication skills and comfort working with senior newsroom leaders, reporters, editors, designers, data journalists and developers.
- Experience balancing fast-turn breaking news coverage with medium- and long-term enterprise projects.
- A reader-first perspective and strong commitment to clarity, accuracy and multiplatform storytelling.
- Familiarity with modern data, mapping, design and visualization tools is helpful, but deep technical expertise is not required.
- Curiosity and openness to experimenting with new storytelling formats, platforms and emerging technologies.
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.
