Head of Partnerships, Fellowship

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Position description

We’re hiring a Head of Partnerships to forge and maintain relationships with top newsrooms as we scale to 30+ fellows in 2027.

The Tarbell Fellowship is one of the most competitive journalism programs in the world. We select 20+ fellows from 1,600+ applicants and provide fully-funded placements at outlets including NPR, CBS, MIT Technology Review, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. We’re hiring a Head of Partnerships, Fellowships, to forge and maintain the relationships with newsrooms that are crucial to our fellowship program’s success.

In your first year, you’ll help us scale our program to 25+ fellows and newsrooms and serve as our liaison to the broader world of journalism. You’ll own the relationships that are key to our success and impact. This is a rare opportunity to shape and improve a crucial beat in journalism at a time of rapid change.

About the Tarbell Center

The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism supports journalism that helps society navigate the development and deployment of advanced AI. We provide funding and training to strengthen AI reporting at major news outlets.

Since 2023, we’ve raised >$30M in funding and supported 75+ journalists through fellowships, grants, and residencies. We’re now entering a period of rapid expansion as we scale from a $4M budget in 2025 to $14M+ in 2027.

Across our programs, we’ve supported a wide range of impactful reporting:

• Accountability reporting: Our journalists have broken corporate accountability stories about OpenAI’s legal tactics against nonprofits and xAI violating its own safety policies. An investigation into Character.AI’s failure to protect minors on its platform contributed to the company banning under-18s within a week of publication. 

• AI policy coverage: Our reporters have produced expert policy analysis, revealed exclusive information about state-level AI policy developments, and investigated AI policy lobbying. 

• Effects from AI: Fellows have covered both the effects of current systems, ranging from climate to mass discrimination, and the emerging risks from frontier models, such as sabotaging shutdown mechanisms or helping engineer pandemics. 

• Sensemaking: We’ve supported explanatory journalism that helps the public make sense of circular funding deals, advancements in automating AI R&D, military integration, and developments in China. 

We believe journalism will be essential to helping society understand and respond to AI advancements in the coming years. By 2030, we aim to grow Tarbell into the leading institution supporting AI journalism globally.

Responsibilities:

• Scout, forge, and maintain Tarbell’s fellowship relationships with top-tier newsrooms . Our fellowship program is currently supporting 28 fellows in 26 newsrooms in the US and around the world, and we’re planning for further growth in 2027 and beyond. You’ll propose newsrooms we should prioritize for expansion, own the strategy to get partners on board, and maintain our crucial ongoing relationships with existing partners.

• Build our journalism fellowship pipelines. You will be our primary on-the-ground representative in the journalism world, assisted by your colleagues: you’ll build relationships with individual journalists, professional organizations, and journalism schools to help us identify promising candidates for our fellowships, and attend conferences and target outreach to cement our reputation as a funder of world-class journalism. 

• Consult on journalism-related topics as needed. We’ll occasionally ask you, along with other former journalists at Tarbell, to contribute your expertise to our overall operations. This might include interviewing fellowship candidates or teaching part of our journalism curriculum.

• Network on behalf of Tarbell and our fellows. Our long-term goal is for our fellows to stay in journalism in full-time roles not supported by Tarbell. As you negotiate our partnerships, you’ll also keep track of hiring needs and our fellows’ strengths so you can help us advance that goal. This could include planning occasional small mixers or networking events, or making one-on-one connections between hiring editors and current and former fellows.

What we’re looking for:

• Newsroom experience, particularly as an editor. You’ve worked in journalism – likely on a science, technology, business, policy, or economics desk. You understand what it takes to succeed in a newsroom and what newsrooms are looking for in a reporting fellow. We think this experience is most likely to correspond to past roles as an editor, but we’ll consider reporters as well.

• Strong relationships in journalism and the ability to build more. Relationships are at the heart of this job. You’ll need to represent Tarbell’s interests with newsrooms — including giving cold pitches, winning over skeptical audiences, and navigating shifting newsroom strategies.

• Familiarity with the AI journalism landscape. While you don’t necessarily need deep technical AI expertise, we want someone with an understanding of the landscape of AI journalism and the gaps and opportunities it presents. By the end of your first year, you should be able to hold your own in discussions of the intellectual and technical questions around transformative AI.

• Strong project management skills. This role requires creating a clear and reliable system to track dozens of relationships with current and potential partnerships. 

• Excellent communication skills. You’ll need to articulate complex ideas clearly and persuasively, both in writing and verbally. 

• Willingness to travel. As Tarbell’s representative to the journalism world, you’ll need to be able to meet with partners in person and attend conferences and networking events. We envision up to 2 cumulative weeks of travel per quarter, depending on your location, including short recruiting visits, trips to conferences, and weeklong team offsites or fellowship summits quarterly. 

• Mission alignment. We’re looking for someone driven to fulfill Tarbell’s mission of supporting journalism that helps society navigate the development and deployment of advanced AI. 

Nice to have:

• Management experience or aptitude. Tarbell is anticipating a period of rapid growth over the next two years, and while this job does not include management n the short term, we’ll have a slight preference for candidates who seem like they can take on direct reports as we expand.

• An understanding of the international journalism landscape. The majority of our partners are based in the US, but not all are, and a perspective on potential partnerships in Europe and Asia could be a plus.

Compensation and location

We’ll offer a salary of $118,000 – $164,000, based on location and experience. Our team is international. Because the majority of our current and potential partners are US-based, we prefer candidates in New York or San Francisco for this role. You’ll work remotely at first, but we expect to have office space in both cities by the end of 2027, with an expectation that you will work in office two days per week. We will also consider candidates in Washington, DC, or candidates who live in other parts of the US.

Our benefits include:

• 33 days of annual leave in total

• 16 weeks of paid parental leave, increasing with tenure

• $2,000 per year in professional development funding

• Up to 5% employer contribution towards a standard pension/401(k)

• For employees based in the US: Platinum health, dental, and vision plans, with 95% of premiums paid for by Tarbell

• Flexible working hours

• Productive, collaborative offices in London 

Application instructions

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