The Correspondent is a Dutch online journalism platform that serves as an antidote to the daily news grind. We publish articles daily, but strive to look beyond today’s latest news hype, to uncover the underlying structures that shape our world. We shift the focus from the attention-grabbing headline to the constructive insight. We went live in September 2013 and have since grown to 40,000 paying members, who make this independent journalism possible. The Correspondent is entirely beholden only to its members and its journalistic principles.

Now that we are about to enter our third year, we want to grow faster. Not only by publishing better stories, but also by improving our platform. We want to build dossiers of related stories and give our readers more ways of sharing their experiences and expertise. To do this well, we are looking for a new front end developer to join our team.

Our cofounder and partner designed and developed decorrespondent.nl and our own CMS, As of January 2015, the Correspondent has a dedicated team of four developers who work at the Momkai studio and at the newsroom of the Correspondent, to further develop the platform.

Developers are just as important to the future of journalism as journalists. After all, you have the skills to build these new narrative forms. Will you come join our startup?

Who are we looking for?

  • You enjoy working with journalists to devise the narrative forms of the future.
  • You thrive in the dynamic environment of a quickly-growing startup. In other words, you are not afraid of chaos, you show initiative, and you want your work to have impact.
  • You pride yourself on writing clean code others can build upon.
  • You have at least 3 years of experience as a front end developer.
  • You are a member of the Correspondent or you support our mission.

What are your skills?

  • You have a solid command of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  • You have experience with CSS preprocessors, responsive design, progressive enhancement, and optimization for different platforms.
  • You can write clean vanilla JavaScript and you can do without jQuery. Some experience with Backbone is preferred.
  • You are used to using a task runner in your development workflow.
  • You have some experience with PHP and templating engines.
  • You are used to working together with other team members in Git.

What do we want to build with you?

  • Continual upgrades to our own WYSIWYG editor, Respondens.
  • Dossiers: We have published over 3000 stories. How can we keep them accessible for members? And how can we enable correspondents and members to create dossiers to cluster and share stories?
  • More ways for members to share their expertise. After all, tens of thousands of members know more than our journalists alone could ever know.
  • Further integration of audio and video in our journalism.
  • A statistics dashboard for internal use to give us better insight into, for example, how many members have renewed their membership, how active members are, on average, what form of membership is most popular, etc.
  • And of course, countless other fantastic features you believe the Correspondent should not be without.

What can we offer?

  • First of all, a lot of responsibility and room for initiative.
  • Great coworkers with ambition. Four developers currently work on the Correspondent, plus additional developers from Momkai. There are also 13 full-time journalists, from a Sports Correspondent to a Europe Correspondent, an Editor, a Photography and Artwork Editor, a Designer, Editorial Managers, a Publisher, Managing Editor Karel Smouter, and Editor in Chief Rob Wijnberg. You work directly with CTO Sebastian Kersten and Publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth, but you will frequently hash out issues with journalists and designers.
  • You will also work with our creative partner Momkai at Barentszplein in Amsterdam, where the programmers work who built the Correspondent from the ground up. And you can use Slack to ask them for help at all other times.
  • Our newsroom, located near Amstel Station in Amsterdam, has a bar.
  • The newsroom has a full kitchen, and we often enjoy home-cooked meals together.

Interested?

Fantastic! Direct your email to Publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth and CTO Sebastian Kersten at sollicitatie@decorrespondent.nl. Please use ‘Front End Developer’ as your subject line. Let us know in your email what projects you have worked on and send us, for instance, your GitHub or Stackoverflow profile. We would also like to know why, of all the organizations you could work for, you want to come work with us. Please submit your application by January 1st, 2016.