AI Fellowship Manager
We're hiring an AI Fellowship Manager to scale the impact of our Tarbell Fellowship and help build a community of expert journalists to hold frontier AI companies accountable, analyze the risks posed by advanced AI, and report on the stories that truly matter.
You'll forge partnerships with leading newsrooms, headhunt the next generation of AI journalists, and lead a growing team to execute on your vision.
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Compensation: $100,000 - $120,000+. For highly experienced candidates, we are open to higher compensation and more senior titles.
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Location: Remote, with preference for London or another relevant journalism hubs (i.e. San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC).
Start Date: June 2025 (flexible) -
Reporting to: Cillian Crosson (Executive Director)
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Deadline: Apply here by 9 April (midnight Anywhere on Earth).
About the Tarbell Center
The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism supports journalism that helps society navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI.
Our programmes include:
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Tarbell Fellowship: Our flagship programme provides early career journalists with training, a stipend of up to $50,000, and a 9-month placement at a major newsroom. 2025 placements include Bloomberg, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, The Information, TIME, LA Times, South China Morning Post, and many others.
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Journalists-in-residence: We provide senior writers with funding to pursue longer investigations, explore entrepreneurial projects, and educate themselves on artificial intelligence.
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Tarbell Grants: We provide awards of $1k-$15k for impactful reporting on artificial intelligence and its impacts. We’ve funded journalists writing for WIRED, The New Yorker, and other top outlets.
By 2029, we aim to support 1,000 high-quality stories on AI and scale to an organisation of similar size and prestige to the Pulitzer Center.
About the role
As AI Fellowship Manager, your mission is to scale the impact of our flagship Tarbell Fellowship.
Currently, we provide early career journalists with training, a stipend of $50,000, and a 9-month placement at a major newsroom. 2025 placements include Bloomberg, MIT Tech Review, The Verge, The Information, TIME, LA Times, South China Morning Post, and many others.
In this role you'll:
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Forge partnerships with more top tier newsrooms. Current placement organisations include Bloomberg, MIT Tech Review, and South China Morning Post. The right person in this role would seek to add 5+ top newsrooms to this list in 2025, e.g. Financial Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
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Identify and persuade the next generation of top AI journalists to join the Tarbell Fellowship. With more exceptional fellows, we could facilitate many more placements than we currently do. You’d help grow the Tarbell Fellowship from 10-15 fellows per year to 20+ by 2026.
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Co-create an ambitious 5-year plan for the Tarbell Fellowship. AI capabilities are advancing at an unprecedented rate and we need a strategy which can keep pace. You’ll help identify priority areas within journalism (ranging from AI advancements in China to investigative journalism targeting frontier AI companies) and then develop a plan for how the fellowship can plug those gaps.
Responsibilities
You’ll own the Tarbell Fellowship and be responsible for overseeing all aspects.
Ranked by impact on the overall mission, this might include:
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Strategic partnerships with newsrooms (35%): You'll be the main point of contact with editors at our current partner organisations: Bloomberg, MIT Tech Review, Los Angeles Times, TIME, The Verge, South China Morning Post, The Information, Platformer, The Dispatch, Euractiv, Lawfare, ChinaTalk, and UnderstandingAI. You'll deepen these relationships and forge new partnerships for 2026 and beyond.
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Recruiting top journalists and AI talent (30%): You'll coordinate our marketing strategy, attracting thousands of applications from rising stars around the globe. Once applications are in, you'll run a multi-stage vetting process: reviewing applications, blind-grading writing samples, and interviewing candidates. Ultimately, you'll select our final pool of Tarbell Fellows, ensuring we retain a high bar for excellence. Ensuring that the top 1% of potential candidates end up in our programme will be a key responsibility of yours.
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Program strategy, growth & team leadership (25%): You’ll act as a strategic partner, co-developing fellowship strategy. This will require identifying gaps in coverage and moving quickly to plug them (e.g. partnering with Foreign Policy and similar outlets to increase the level of understanding among the national security community of transformative AI coverage). Under the right person, the fellowship team could grow significantly by 2026, and we’d like someone who can lead this expansion: hiring, developing, and leading this team. We’ll fast track your progress if we see early signs of success.
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Flawless execution of the fellowship (10%): You’ll be responsible for all aspects of the Tarbell Fellowship, either executing tasks directly or overseeing others to do so. A key component here will be ensuring our 10-week AI Journalism Fundamentals course and week-long San Francisco Summit are world-class. We don’t necessarily expect you to do everything yourself (e.g. you could contract external experts in AI and/or journalism) and we’ve previously worked closely with senior reporters who’ve worked at TIME, the New York Times, and the Economist. However, high task volume will be the norm and world-class execution will be expected.
Who might be a good fit
We're looking for an excellent executor with a strong understanding of advanced AI. Prior familiarity with journalism is not required as you'll work closely alongside Anna Gordon, our AI Journalism Lead.
You might be a particularly good fit for this role if you are:
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Organised and competent at project management. We are looking for someone with experience managing complex projects with multiple stakeholders. You should feel confident with goal-tracking, system-building, and keeping teams on track to meet ambitious deadlines.
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A strong understanding of advanced AI, or the ability to learn this quickly. You understand basic concepts in machine learning (e.g. transformers, gradient descent), are familiar with various governance topics (e.g. responsible scaling policies, compute governance, capabilities evaluations), and can identify the key players & factions in the AI landscape.
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Highly autonomous and proactive. Successful candidates will proactively identify pain points and inefficiencies in our current process and set out to fix them.
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An excellent communicator, both written and verbal. We are looking for someone who can build partnerships with news outlets and convey complex ideas clearly.
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Driven to further Tarbell’s mission of supporting journalism that helps society navigate the emergence of increasingly advanced AI.
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Bonus points for:
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Journalism experience. While journalism experience is valuable, we prioritize candidates with strong project management and leadership capabilities. You’ll work alongside Anna Gordon, our AI Journalism Lead, who will bring journalism experience to the team
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Experience running similar training programmes.
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Leadership ability, including a track record of effective people management and leading high performance teams
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We encourage speculative applications; we expect many strong candidates will not meet all of the criteria listed
Location
Our team is international and we’re open to international candidates working remotely from anywhere. However, we have a particular preference for candidates based in London, or willing to relocate, and can sponsor UK work authorisation for eligible candidates. We're also open to other relevant journalism hubs such as San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC (but are not yet in a position to sponsor US work authorisation).
We require all staff to spend 1 week every quarter on site, typically in London or San Francisco. Additionally, occasional travel may be required (approximately 1 week per quarter).
Benefits
Our benefits include:
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33 days of paid holiday in total (including national holidays)
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$4,500 annual budget for equipment and office space.
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$5,000 annual budget for personal development and productivity.
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Standard pension, with 3% contribution from employer.
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Flexible work schedule & location (when and where you work is mostly up to you).
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A work environment that supports you to grow and challenges you to do your best work
Operating Values
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Focus is good: Do fewer things. When it matters, do them to a world-class standard.
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Hire the best, then invest: We hire people in the top 10% and then help them get to the top 1%.
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Freedom & responsibility: We trust people to own their work and outcomes, pairing autonomy with accountability.
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Radical candour: We provide direct feedback that is kind and clear, honest and sincere (even when it’s difficult).
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Safe to speak, safe to fail: We create an environment where people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of blame. Feedback is about learning, not punishment
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Truthful & transparent: We believe in being truthful & transparent, even when it's difficult or disadvantageous to do so.
Application Process
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Round 1: Apply here by 9 April (midnight Anywhere on Earth).
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Round 2: We’ll then invite candidates to complete:
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A 60-minute interview with Cillian.
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A 3-5 hour work task. We will compensate candidates $60 / hour for time spent on work tasks.
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Round 3: A 2 day work trial with our team (in-person in London strongly preferred). We offer a $1,000 total stipend for the two-day trial, plus reimbursement of travel and accommodation costs.