Ten years ago, the phrase “chatbots with specific character voices” would not have appeared in a journalism job posting. But here we are in 2026, and The Economist — hiring for a senior AI engineer for its AI Lab — mentions that “fine-tuning [AI] models for style or persona” is a great bit of experience for the role.
The senior AI engineer position is one entry in a list included in a “Future Newsrooms Study” report from FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA. The report, published this week and set to be released annually, is designed to help publishers “future-proof their newsrooms.”
The report’s authors combed through 6,687 LinkedIn job listings, classified 234 as strategy roles, and narrowed those down further to 16 “emerging strategy function roles” in four categories:
- Audience strategy: “Embedded audience editors who shape coverage, distribution, and platform choices across desks”
- AI innovation in editorial: “Editor-coders who shadow reporters, find AI-solvable pain points, and build prototypes themselves”
- Editorial-led product and design: “Designers and product directors sitting at the editorial table, reimagining the news object itself for AI-native interfaces
- Newsroom engineering: “Editorial-led engineering teams shipping AI features every few weeks, with the editor-in-charge personally reviewing pull requests.”
I looked up all the jobs to see how they’re described and what the companies say they’re looking for. (Politico, for instance, says in its posting for an editorial director of newsroom engineering: “We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building Politico-specific models that competitors can’t replicate.”)
You might consider these listings inspiration for new positions in your newsroom. Or maybe you’ll find them interesting as you think about your next gig. (I tried to note below whether the job postings are still open, but I’m obviously not the hiring manager for any of them, don’t email me!)
Anyway, here are the jobs. I’ve listed them from highest salary range to lowest; the ones that don’t give a salary range at all are at the end.
Position: Editor, newsroom development and support
Publisher: The New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “5+ years of experience managing people whose portfolio includes media innovation”
Salary range: $200,000 to $230,000
From the description:
The New York Times is looking for a leader to reimagine and guide its Newsroom Development and Support (NDS) team, a vital department responsible for ensuring the evolution of internal tools and practices that empower our journalists to produce their best work.
You are a dynamic person who can lead the continuing transformation of those in the newsroom who create journalism and those who support its creation. You have a strong journalistic foundation to guide this department into its next chapter. And you have the flexibility required to oversee a team that includes journalists, technologists, trainers and project managers.
The NDS team comprises two distinct groups: the editorial development arm designs training programs based on updated tools and develops curricula covering topics from clear writing to effective tagging; the newsroom technology group focuses on internal and external tools, including publishing, planning, and data management, and serves as the newsroom’s liaison to product, design, and engineering teams.
Position: Audience deputy, off-platform
Publisher: New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “10+ years of editorial experience including managing audience teams”
Salary range: $180,000 to $210,000
From the description:
Reporting to the Newsroom Audience Director, you will be the primary architect of our strategy for reaching and engaging readers on search and social platforms, ensuring The Times’s journalism remains visible and relevant as the digital landscape is reshaped by AI and shifting platform dynamics.
The role requires a change-oriented leader who can identify emerging trends, make fast but accurate editorial decisions, and deploy resources against the highest-impact platforms, coverage and tactics. You will be careful with framing and timing, communicate with desks and across teams effectively and proactively, and serve as the key conduit for translating how platform changes, including the disruption driven by AI features, impact our audience to newsroom and business leaders.
Position: Product director, multimodal, news product
Publisher: New York Times
Location: New York
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “7+ years of product management experience, including ownership of product strategy and roadmap. “
Salary range: $160,000 to $190,000
From the description:
The New York Times is looking for a Product Director to lead our Multimodal product team within the News Product Mission. Our goal is to be the entry point for news for tens of millions more people around the world by being their first read, watch or listen — every day.
We’ve focused on making our journalism more accessible through format innovation for years. Over the next few years, we want to go further. We are building toward an experience where people can come to The Times and engage with the most important and interesting journalism. This experience will allow people to engage in the format that works for them every day.
The Multimodal team and the News Product Mission works on editorially-grounded initiatives with our journalists at the speed of the news cycle. We want a product leader who is passionate about the news, eager to work in a fast-paced environment, and invested in creating news product experiences that reflect the same level of excellence as our journalism.
You will report to the VP of News Product and will manage a small team of product managers. You will partner closely with newsroom leaders, journalists, engineers, designers and other partners to shape strategy and deliver high-quality multimodal experiences across our platforms.
Position: Head of product design
Publisher: The Washington Post
Location: Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: $159,100 to $265,100
From the description:
The Washington Post is looking for a design leader with exceptional taste, product intuition, and a point of view about the future of interfaces. This isn’t only a role for someone who wants to manage a design team; it’s for someone who wants to shape how journalism is experienced globally.
You will define how millions of people engage with news in a world being reshaped by AI, platform disruption, and declining trust in high-quality information and expertise. You will help transform The Post into a portfolio of products more adaptive, more human, and more essential to daily life than ever before. Few roles offer this level of influence over such an important product category that does so much for the public good at such a critical time for the industry and the world.
The Washington Post is in the middle of a fundamental reinvention. Design is a primary driver of how we grow, differentiate, and serve the public.
Position: Technical product manager — content platform
Publisher: Bloomberg
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “A minimum of 5+ years of product management or related experience”
Salary range: $140,000 to $295,000
From the description:
The Content Platform team owns the end-to-end platform and strategic direction for Bloomberg’s unstructured content across core domains including News, Research, Media, and other content types. The team is responsible for the canonical content model and the ingestion, storage, projection, and distribution capabilities that make content reliable, reusable, and consumable across downstream systems — particularly AI-driven use cases. Working in close partnership with Engineering, Data and other Product teams, the group ensures content is discoverable, indexable, and usable at scale across both the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg’s Enterprise lines of business. In addition, the team is accountable for platform-wide metrics, measurements, and statistics, providing transparent, quantifiable insight across every stage of the content lifecycle. Its mandate is to set the strategy, standards, and roadmap for unstructured content as a shared Bloomberg platform — ensuring consistency, scalability, and long-term leverage as content and consumption models evolve.
We are seeking a Product Manager to lead Delivery & Consumption for the Content Platform. In this role, you will define how canonical content is exposed and consumed across Bloomberg systems, including the Terminal, Enterprise products, search, and AI use cases.
You will own the projection layer and the distribution interfaces that make content accessible to downstream consumers. Working closely with engineering, AI, and product teams, you will ensure content is delivered in forms that meet latency, scalability, and reproducibility requirements while maintaining a consistent canonical model.
Position: Senior product manager — AI product
Publisher: USA Today Co.
Location: Remote
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required:
Salary range: $120,000 to $125,000
From the description:
USA Today Co. uses AI build‑out across our newsrooms and product surfaces with journalistic standards, and this role sits at the center of that work. You will turn real newsroom workflows into working AI products like rapidly working prototyping, pressure testing what’s real, and then partnering with core product teams to ship and scale what works.
You’ll join a small, hands-on AI product group embedded in the enterprise, working directly with reporters, editors, and internal stakeholders to uncover high value problems, design and test AI‑powered solutions, and generate the evidence needed for investment decisions. Once ideas show product market fit sign, you’ll own the handoff: translating prototypes into crisp specs and collaborating with engineering and editorial to launch, iterate, and maintain them in production.
This is a builder operator role. You move quickly from idea to working demo, and you bring rigor to what sticks — defining success, measuring impact, and killing what doesn’t deliver.
Position: Senior product manager
Publisher: The Atlantic
Location: New York, NY
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “5+ years in product management, preferably at a media, subscription, or consumer tech company”
Salary range: $115,000 to $175,000
From the description:
We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager who’s creative, driven, and genuinely excited about journalism. Someone who sees technology as a way to get great ideas in front of more people — and who wants to help shape how The Atlantic reaches readers in a changing media landscape. You’ll work on products that matter: our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism deserves a reading experience that lives up to it.
The right person for this role is a sharp problem solver and an opportunity finder who shows up with ideas and perspective. They move fast, try things, learn from what doesn’t work, and keep going. You’ll report to the Product Executive Director and work closely with editorial, design, engineering, and data science. It’s a collaborative team that cares deeply about the work — and we’re looking for someone who does too.
Position: Senior editor, AI innovation
Publisher: CNN
Location: New York, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “7+ years of experience in journalism, digital media, product, or a related field with hands-on work in editorial workflows”
Salary range: $87,000 to $162,500
From the description:
CNN is seeking a Senior Editor, AI Innovation to prototype, test and deploy AI-powered tools, workflows and systems that advance our distinctive reporting and newsroom efficiency. Embedded in editorial operations, this role partners closely with reporters — particularly on investigative, enterprise, and data-driven work — to develop practical, scalable AI solutions that enhance research, editing, information management, and production. The role requires strong technical fluency, editorial judgment, and expertise in prompt-driven and agentic AI systems, with a focus on ensuring all AI-assisted work meets CNN’s standards for accuracy, objectivity, fairness, and transparency.
Position: Editor, audience — news
Publisher: CNN
Location: New York, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “3+ years in digital journalism, audience or content strategy, or analytics”
Salary range: $77,000 to $143,000
From the description:
The Audience Editor is the embedded, desk‑specific partner to Audience Strategy & Insights, translating audience signals into clear editorial choices. You will supply the desk with essential performance learnings; shape framing, formats, and distribution to meet audience demand; and collaborate across Search, Social, Home, Newsletters, and Product to maximize reach, habit, and engagement (including among subscribers).
This role sits at the intersection of editorial judgment and evidence — collaborative, rigorous in approach, and focused on measurable outcomes. You will work closely within our Audience Strategy & Insights operating model and in partnership with DART (Data, Analytics, Research & Testing) to turn insights into action and build repeatable practices the desk can rely on.
Position: Podcast social video editor
Publisher: Vox
Location: New York
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “5+ years of experience creating social-first video content and motion graphic assets for media brands, preferably including podcasts”
Salary range: $76,000 to $95,000
From the description:
As a Podcast Social Video Editor you will drive the creative vision for short-form social content across the Vox Media slate and oversee the producers who make it. You’ll align workflows and standards, build the content calendar, and steward performance and quality. You will ensure each show’s social media output meets its unique audience while fitting within network-level strategy.
Position: Senior channel manager, YouTube, BBC children’s & education
Publisher: BBC
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: £45,000 to £58,000
From the description:
This role has responsibility for leading a portfolio of YouTube activity for BBC Children’s & Education, including line management of YouTube Channel Managers. You will oversee the strategic planning, delivery and performance of YouTube content across channels; supporting creative development, use of audience insights and effective collaboration with internal teams. You’ll also be responsible for signing off content and ensuring all output meets editorial, legal and compliance standards.
Position: Senior AI engineer, AI Lab
Publisher: The Economist
Location: London
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: “3+ years experience building with LLMs or NLP pipelines (ideally hands-on with OpenAI, Claude, Cohere, Gemini, Mistral, HuggingFace)”
Salary range: N/A
From the description:
This is a full-time role at the centre of our new AI Lab, a small team exploring how generative AI might shape the future of Economist journalism. This role will focus on building and fine-tuning LLM-powered systems with a particular focus on editorial tone, style transfer, retrieval workflows, and multimodal generation (especially audio).
You’ll ship products from zero-to-one and see your ideas directly influence how millions of readers interact with our journalism. If you enjoy working close to design, iterating fast, and building novel interactions across text, voice, and visuals, we’d love to hear from you. You’ll be one of the first three engineers in a dedicated lab, working alongside the Tech Lead, Design Lead and Product Lead.
Position: Editorial director, newsroom engineering
Publisher: Politico
Location: Arlington, Va.
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:
We’re at an inflection point: AI is reshaping how audiences find, consume, and interact with news. Politico’s advantage remains our original reporting, our judgment, and our distinct voice. But to protect and extend that advantage we need the newsroom at the center of innovation — moving faster, experimenting more boldly, and turning pilots into reliable infrastructure rather than one-off demos.
We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building Politico-specific models that competitors can’t replicate. We also want to invest knowledge and technical thinking in our newsroom to more closely connect our journalism with our innovative product building.
Politico is seeking an editorial-minded technical leader to lead this team and serve as our Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering. This role will be a player-coach who turns newsroom priorities into tools, workflows, and platforms that help our reporters and editors move faster without sacrificing accuracy or voice.
You’ll run team’s agile rituals; personally review high-risk pull requests; evaluate outcomes; and contribute code. In 2026, the team’s mandate is to help every desk leverage AI and other new technologies in practical, novel ways. Adoption and impact are the bar for success with KPIs measured by minutes saved, time-to-publish, quality preserved, and active usage. You’ll also be responsible for translating editorial priorities into a living roadmap. You’ll identify use cases and opportunities for workflow improvements by staying connected to newsroom priorities and fostering relationships with editors and reporters.
Position: Manager, product design
Publisher: Philadelphia Inquirer
Location: Philadelphia
Posting still up? Yes
Years of experience required: “10+ years experience in digital product design, including experience leading or coaching designers”
Salary range: N/A
From the description:
The Philadelphia Inquirer is looking for a Manager, Product Design to lead a team of designers creating thoughtful, reader-centered experiences across Inquirer.com, our mobile apps, newsletters, and emerging platforms.
This is a hands-on, coaching-focused role. You’ll help designers do their best work through clear feedback, strong project guidance, and close partnership with product and engineering. You’ll set a high bar for quality and process, and you may jump in directly on important projects when needed.
Reporting to the VP, Product, you’ll work closely with product management, user research, engineering, newsroom leadership, sales, and consumer marketing to improve subscriber growth, engagement, and retention.
Position: Assistant manager, content and AI innovation
Publisher: South China Morning Post
Location: Hong Kong
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:
The Assistant Manager (Content & AI Innovation) is a hybrid role dedicated to empowering the newsroom through artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven growth strategies. You will bridge the gap between editorial needs and technical execution — designing, building, and deploying AI “agents,” automation workflows, and even non-AI skillsets to boost productivity and efficiency aligned with professional and quality journalism.
Position: Technical product manager
Publisher: The Sun
Location: London
Posting still up? No
Years of experience required: N/A
Salary range: N/A
From the description:
Working in the Sun product team, you will be responsible for our core platform and innovation initiatives. You will own the strategy and development for the foundational, shared technologies that power our entire digital estate, ensuring they are robust, scalable and enable other product teams to deliver value faster. Additionally, you will be our champion for innovation, tasked with exploring, prototyping and integrating new technologies and techniques. This includes investigating how AI can support our future plans and how our newsrooms can leverage new tools to drive efficiencies, ensuring The Sun stays at the cutting edge of digital media.
