For news organizations navigating fewer traditional career paths and intense competition for talent, recruiting and retaining good journalists has become more critical and more creative. Recruiters across metropolitan, rural and nonprofit newsrooms are finding that talent can come from unexpected places and that active recruiting matters. Just as important, they say, is building workplaces where journalists see a future for themselves and meaningful impact from their work.
Cristina Silva landed her first job by following the advice of a column she now writes.
Silva, The Boston Globe’s managing editor for operations and standards, writes Poynter’s weekly “Ask the Recruiter” column, following in the footsteps of the column’s creator, Joe Grimm. She said she came from a blue-collar family, so at the beginning of her journalism career, she learned skills like résumé writing and networking from Grimm’s column.
“His column was really like a North Star for me,” she said.
In her current role, one of the Globe’s 250-person newsroom, she often receives questions from journalists, both experienced and aspiring, asking her how to navigate the industry in its tumultuous state. She said she wants to be helpful and encouraging, like Grimm was to her.
“You can make it. You can do it. You just have to keep going,” she said.
For journalists and others looking to land a job in news media, the prospects can be few and competition for them fierce. Silva said she has seen fewer jobs and “many hundreds of people” applying to the few that are available.
In August, Silva was a guest on “E&P Reports.” She spoke with host and E&P Publisher Mike Blinder about her new column and tips for candidates navigating the job market. Silva said she’s seen typical career pathways — working for a smaller newspaper and moving on to a larger publication — disrupted, by virtue of there being far fewer news outlets.
“For a lot of young people, they're trying different things, like freelancing. Or a lot more veteran journalists are becoming independent consultants and things like that. So, I think there are more paths that people are taking into the newsroom,” she said.
Recruiting for rural newsrooms
Major news markets, like New York City and Washington, D.C., naturally draw the attention of aspiring news professionals — for the wealth of opportunities and higher median news-media salaries. But working in local newsrooms in smaller markets has its perks, too. There is real opportunity to do impactful work in smaller markets and small towns.
Jennifer Fischer, deputy publisher for CherryRoad Media, has seen a similar phenomenon for the company’s rural newsrooms across the country. CherryRoad Media publishes 103 titles in 19 states. It recently acquired newspapers under threat of closure. The company has launched new newspapers and revived community newspapers, representing a six-year period of “fast and furious growth,” Fischer said.
Employee retention isn’t a problem for the company. Many of CherryRoad Media’s employees have worked at their respective news brands for decades. But when employees retire, the company seeks to fill those positions. Applicants have varied professional backgrounds but share a common interest in supporting their communities with trusted local news. Fischer said fewer applicants have journalism degrees.
“It’s been very interesting for me, because I didn’t go to school for that myself. I have a psychology degree and an education degree, but I don’t turn away people who are interested just because they don’t have the formal training,” she said.
Most of CherryRoad’s brands serve small towns with community-level journalism. And they often fill open positions by word of mouth — a recommendation to hire a recently graduated student or a retiree who’d like to play a more active role in the community.
Fischer said she posts job openings on the company’s website, places ads in their papers and on Jobcase. She said the number of applicants depends on the area of the country, but they tend to receive more applicants if the newspaper is located near a city or a college.
Fischer said she wishes she could gather employees scattered around the country in a single room to discuss their shared interests or complementary skills.
To accomplish the goal remotely, she runs professional development training called Friday Focus with her colleague, Editorial Operations Manager Jeff Gulley, on the last Friday of each month. The sessions include a half-hour training hosted by a CherryRoad employee speaking on a topic of their choosing, such as back-to-school coverage, photography, interviewing skills, community features, investigative journalism, sports coverage or videography.
“We’ve used these sessions at the end of each month to kind of bring all of our editorial teams together,” she said. The sessions also cover best practices, provide company updates and recognize award-winning employees.
“I think by getting on a call with 100 colleagues or 50 colleagues and sharing the best work that everyone’s doing, it kind of inspires everybody else to kick it up a notch and try something different,” she said.
A nonprofit newsroom with impact
On the day of his interview with Editor & Publisher about recruiting, Spotlight Delaware’s Chief Operating Officer Matt Sullivan sent out a job offer, posted a job opening and onboarded a new employee.
“So, the whole circle of life of the recruitment cycle is happening all in one day for me,” he said.
The nonprofit newsroom was founded by Allison Taylor Levine in January 2024. Sullivan joined in December 2024. The company has about 20 employees, with roughly half working in the newsroom.
Spotlight Delaware pays “easily above industry norms,” according to Sullivan, who said he and Levine recalled all too well what it was like in the 1990s, when they were each starting their careers, making less than a living wage.
“I vividly remember driving to my first job, coming out of Columbia [Journalism School], seeing the sign in my second week outside the Burger King advertising the hourly wage for managers and doing the math in my head and getting depressed,” he said. “And we don’t want that, so our reporters have started between $55,000 and $60,000 out of school.”
In addition, he said the organization has cultivated a workplace culture that is “holistic, respectful” and “radically transparent.” Spotlight Delaware feels like a team across its departments, and the newsroom feels supported, he said. “I believe that we can produce better impact with better people, and I think what we have seen is that people have been surprised at the impact we’ve been able to make in our first couple of years because of that.”
Among their most impactful reporting was a monthslong investigation by Reporter Nick Stonesifer, who won the 2025 “Rookie of the Year” award from the MDDC Press Association. Stonesifer investigated the “charity care” at the state’s largest health system, and in June, Delaware Governor Matt Meyer signed legislation requiring Delaware hospitals to provide more free and reduced-price care for low-income patients. The Senate Bill sets the highest threshold of medically necessary free care of any state in the country and requires health systems to make greater efforts to notify patients of financial assistance.
“At the end of this legislative session, we really felt, wow, this is actually having a specific, direct impact on people’s lives. That felt good,” Sullivan said.
Advice from recruiters
Each of these recruiters, who represent a range in the size of publications and business models, said their best candidates are found through word of mouth. Sullivan said he avoids posting jobs to major job sites, finding they draw an overwhelming number of applicants whose qualifications don’t match the position. He said asking applicants to email their résumés weeds out the applicants who mass-apply to jobs. He also posts on job boards for associations for underrepresented journalists, hoping to attract diverse candidates.
Silva said she is always on the lookout for promising candidates, reaching out when she reads a story she likes or to congratulate a journalist for winning an award. She said she believes in “active recruiting.” If The Boston Globe has a city hall reporter position open, she researches the best city hall reporters and asks them if they are interested.
“I think, as a recruiter, you have to be strategic about it and aggressive, and you don’t just wait around and see who applies,” she said.
Silva said that as she narrows her field of applicants to about 15 or 20, she looks beyond the résumé, cover letter and clips to their social media accounts and their body of work published online. Once she narrows that list to five or 10 people, she contacts their former colleagues to ask about them.
A common mistake she sees in résumés is vagueness. She said that the résumé should be written specifically for the position, and it should highlight skills that are listed in the job description. For example, a résumé may say that the reporter covered city hall, but the common job title can stand out if the applicant shares a scoop they got or a data point. “Like, ‘I went through 600 pages of the budget to get a scoop that the city was spending less money on the fire department;’ or, ‘My stories were the most read of last year.’ Or, ‘I converted 100 subscribers based on my stories.’ Whatever specific information you can show to show me that you fit the job description — that you’re an investigative reporter, that you’re a beat reporter, that you’re an enterprise reporter, that you can break news, that you can move quickly, that you understand audience work — whatever I'm looking for, your résumé should speak to that,” she said.
During an interview, she said promising candidates come prepared with the points they want to make on why they should be hired. They speak succinctly, allowing Silva to get through all the questions she prepared. Come to the interview with confidence, she said, to show interviewers that you can handle high-stress situations.
“Whenever I talk to other journalists about the great stories they want to do, the way that they want to help their community, the way that they want to reach people wherever they are … I’m so inspired,” she said. “People really, really care. This isn’t just a job. There’s a lot of easier ways to make a living. This is something that a lot of us really love and care about, and we are trying to make the world a better place. I still believe in that mission.”
Alyssa Alyssa Choiniere is a freelance journalist based in southwestern Pennsylvania. She is writing a nonfiction book for Rutgers University Press, “Be Home Before the Streetlights Come On: The Political Hijacking of Child-Trafficking Terror.”
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