Careers
Come and do the work properly
Eight roles are open across our India and overseas bureaux — on the road, on the copy desk, in the data unit and in engineering. We tell you what the job is, what it pays into, and exactly how the hiring works before you apply.
Why work in this newsroom
NewsDunia is not a large organisation by circulation standards, and we do not pretend that every day is an investigation. Most days are ordinary: a committee report to read, a filing to check, three calls that go nowhere and one that does. What we can promise is that the ordinary work is respected here, and that nobody will ask you to publish something you cannot stand behind.
Editors edit. Every reporter has a named desk editor who reads their copy properly, argues with the structure, checks the source note and takes responsibility alongside them when a story lands badly. New hires are given a two-week induction on our standards document before they file anything, and a mentor outside their own desk for the first year.
Bylines belong to the people who did the reporting, including stringers and researchers. Time in the field is budgeted rather than begged for. Shifts are rostered four weeks ahead, night duty is shared across the desk rather than concentrated on the newest hire, and no one is expected to be reachable on a day off unless they are on a published rota.
And the commercial wall is real. If a sales conversation ever touches your reporting, the escalation path is one email to the Editor-in-Chief, and the outcome is recorded. It has been tested four times since 2022; the story ran on all four occasions.
Above: Reporting, desk editing and field audio — the three halves of a newsroom day. NewsDunia illustration.
What we look for
Habits, not pedigree — we have hired from journalism schools, district papers and none of the above
Curiosity with a paper trail
We want to see that you read the annexure, not just the press note. The best applications we receive point at something small and specific that everyone else missed, and explain how it could be checked.
Comfort being wrong
Everyone makes errors. What matters is whether you notice, say so quickly and without defensiveness, and change the process so it does not recur. We ask about this in every interview.
Plain writing
Sentence-case headlines, short sentences, no jargon that a reader outside the beat would need to decode. If a paragraph only makes sense to people already in the room, it is not finished.
Numeracy
You do not need statistics training, but you should be able to spot a percentage of a percentage, know why a base year matters, and be willing to ask what the denominator is before writing the sentence.
Fairness under pressure
Right of reply is not a formality here. We look for people who will delay a story by a day to let someone answer properly, and who can argue for that against a competitive deadline.
A language beyond English
Not required, always valued. Reporters who can interview in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Assamese or Telugu reach sources that our English-only coverage never will.
Open roles
Eight vacancies, updated Tuesday 21 July 2026. Applications close on the date shown.
Editorial
Senior Correspondent — policy and governance
You will cover the machinery of government rather than the theatre of it: committee proceedings, tabled replies, draft rules out for consultation and the money that follows them. Expect roughly three substantial pieces a week, one longer explainer a month, and regular travel to state capitals. We are looking for at least six years of reporting experience, a demonstrable habit of reading primary documents, and sources who will still take your call after you have written something they disliked.
Editorial
Data Journalist — data unit
Acquire, clean, verify and interrogate public datasets, then publish them alongside the story under an open licence. You will pair with reporters across desks, write the methodology notes that sit beneath our charts, and hold the line when an interesting-looking series turns out not to support the headline. Comfortable with Python or R, SQL and spreadsheets used seriously; you should be able to explain a confidence interval to a desk editor in one sentence.
Visual journalism
Video Producer — explainers and field
Produce two explainer films a week and one field piece a month, from commissioning through script, shoot, edit and captioning. Our video carries the same sourcing standards as our text: no borrowed footage without provenance, no reconstructed scenes, no music doing the argument’s work. You will run a two-person crew, work closely with the data unit on motion charts, and own accessibility — every film ships with accurate captions and a transcript.
Audio
Podcast Editor — daily and documentary
Take editorial charge of a fifteen-minute daily news podcast and two documentary series a year. You will commission from the desks, shape scripts, run the tape, and hold contributors to the same standards as print — including the discipline of cutting a beautiful piece of tape when it is not properly sourced. Five years in audio, a strong ear for structure, and the patience to teach reporters how to speak into a microphone.
Editorial
Sub-Editor — central copy desk
The copy desk is the last line of defence and we staff it accordingly. You will edit for accuracy, structure and law; write sentence-case headlines that do not overclaim; check that the chart, caption and headline all say what the text says; and challenge anything that reads like it came from a press release. Rotating early and late shifts on a four-week published roster, with night duty shared evenly across the desk.
Audience
Digital Growth Manager — reader revenue
Grow paying readership without the tricks that erode trust: no dark patterns, no obstructed cancellation, no clickbait rewrites of accurate headlines. You will own subscription funnels, newsletter growth and lifecycle testing, work with editors on what to put in front of the paywall, and report honestly when a test that lifts conversion also lifts complaints. Five years in subscription or audience roles, and real comfort with analytics.
Product & engineering
Front-End Engineer — reading experience
Our pages have to load on a slow connection in a district town and be usable with a screen reader. You will work on the article template, live-blog and election interactives, and on the internal tools journalists use to publish. Deep HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript; WCAG 2.2 AA treated as a floor, not a target; and the judgement to argue against a feature that would cost 200KB for a marginal gain.
Commercial
Ad Operations Manager — delivery and compliance
Run campaign trafficking, inventory forecasting, viewability reporting and creative quality control — including the labelling rules that keep sponsored material unmistakably distinct from journalism. This role sits entirely outside editorial and has no access to unpublished stories, by design. Four years in ad operations, fluency with an ad server, and a genuine interest in advertising that is fast, clearly marked and not creepy.
Do not see your role? We keep speculative applications on file for twelve months and read every one. Write to the desk through our contact page with a short note and three examples of your work.
How we hire
Five stages, roughly four weeks end to end, and you hear from a person at every one
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Application
A short covering note — half a page is plenty — a CV, and three examples of your work with one line each explaining what was hard about them. Applications are read by the hiring editor, not by software, and identifying details are removed before the first read.
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First conversation
Forty-five minutes with the hiring editor, by video or in the bureau. Mostly about how you work: how you find things out, how you decide something is solid enough to publish, and what you did the last time you got something wrong.
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Editorial test
A three-hour exercise, done at a time that suits you, and paid at our standard freelance day rate. Reporters get a bundle of real documents and are asked what the story is, what is missing and who they would call. Sub-editors edit a flawed draft and write the headline. Engineers ship a small accessible component. We never ask for unpaid spec work and we never publish anything produced in a test.
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Panel interview
Ninety minutes with three people: the hiring editor, a peer from another desk and a senior editor. We go through your test in detail, discuss two standards scenarios — usually an anonymous-source decision and a right-of-reply decision — and leave a third of the time for your questions.
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Offer, references and induction
Offers state the pay band, the roster pattern and the reporting line in writing. References are taken only after an offer is agreed and never from a current employer without your consent. Everyone starts with a two-week standards induction and is assigned a mentor from a different desk for their first year.
Unsuccessful candidates who reach the test stage receive written feedback within ten working days. If you need an adjustment at any stage — extra time, a different format, an accessible venue, an interpreter — tell us when you apply and it will be arranged without it counting against you.
Benefits
What the job comes with, stated plainly
Published pay bands
Every role sits in a band that is published internally and reviewed annually against an external benchmark. We do not ask for your current salary and we do not negotiate individual exceptions.
Health cover
Family medical cover including parents, outpatient mental-health sessions with no cap on the first twelve a year, and annual health checks for staff on rotating night shifts.
Leave that is taken
Thirty days annual leave plus public holidays, six months paid parental leave for the primary carer and twelve weeks for the second, and a mandatory ten-day continuous break each year.
Reporting support
A per-desk travel and documents budget you can draw on without a business case, legal support for anything you publish here, and hostile-environment and digital-security training for field staff.
Time to learn
Ten paid days a year for training, plus a rotating six-week desk exchange so a business reporter can spend time on the health desk and come back with better questions.
Predictable shifts
Rosters are published four weeks ahead. Night and weekend duty rotates across the desk, is paid at a premium, and is followed by a guaranteed clear day.
Bylines and credit
Reporting is credited to whoever did it, including stringers, researchers and translators. Contributions to an investigation appear in the story, not in an internal memo.
Sabbatical
After five years, a paid two-month sabbatical for a reporting project, a course or a book. Twenty-two colleagues have taken one since the scheme opened in 2021.
Internships and the NewsDunia Fellowship
Twelve funded places a year for early-career journalists
Every internship at NewsDunia is paid at a published stipend, and we cover travel and accommodation for interns joining a bureau away from home. Unpaid internships filter for family money rather than for talent, and we do not run them.
Summer internships run for eight weeks from June across the India, Business, Technology, Health and Sports desks. Interns are given real assignments with a named supervising editor, and published work carries their byline. Applications open in February.
The NewsDunia Fellowship is a twelve-month funded programme for journalists with fewer than three years’ experience, with a strong preference for applicants from districts and small towns whose newsrooms rarely reach national coverage. Fellows spend three months each on the copy desk, a reporting desk, the data unit and a bureau of their choosing, receive a full salary rather than a stipend, and are given a mentor and a travel budget for one self-directed project. Six of the twenty-four fellows since 2022 are now on staff, and we help the rest find placements elsewhere.
We also run district reporting workshops twice a year, free to attend, for stringers and local reporters who want training in document research, right of reply and digital security. Two hundred and ten journalists have been through them; most do not work for us and never will, which is the point.
Diversity in the newsroom
A commitment with numbers attached, published every year
A newsroom that all went to the same four colleges will keep missing the same stories. We publish the composition of our editorial staff each year — by gender, by state of origin, by language of first education and by whether a colleague is the first person in their family to finish university — because a commitment without a measurement is a slogan.
In practice this means: vacancies advertised beyond the metros and in languages other than English; applications read without names or institutions attached at the first stage; shortlists that are re-opened if they contain nobody from outside the largest cities; interview panels of at least three, never all of one gender; and adjustments arranged for disabled applicants as a matter of course, not as a favour.
We are not where we want to be. Women hold 44% of editorial roles but only 36% of senior editing positions; reporters educated primarily outside English remain under-represented on the business and technology desks. Both figures are in our annual report with the actions attached to them, and the Editorial Standards Committee reviews progress every quarter.
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Women in editorial
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States of origin
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Languages spoken
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Fellows a year
Hiring questions, answered
Four things candidates ask us most often
No, to both. Roughly a third of our editorial staff have no journalism qualification, and several of our strongest reporters came from district papers, trade publications, research organisations or an entirely different profession. What we assess is the work you show us and how you performed in the editorial test — which is why the test is weighted more heavily than the CV.
Where a role does need a specific competence — a data journalist who can write SQL, an engineer who understands assistive technology — we say so in the listing and we test for the competence itself rather than for a credential that implies it.
Yes. The test takes about three hours, is scheduled at a time that suits you, and is paid at our standard freelance day rate whether or not you go further. Nothing produced in a test is ever published or used by NewsDunia in any form; the material is deleted once the process closes.
The content depends on the role. Reporting candidates receive a bundle of genuine public documents and are asked what the story is, what is missing, whom they would call and what would stop them publishing. Sub-editors edit a deliberately flawed draft and write a headline and a standfirst. Engineers build one small, accessible component. Growth and ad ops candidates work through a real scenario with anonymised numbers.
Outside writing is allowed with your editor’s agreement, provided it does not compete with your beat, does not create a conflict of interest, and is not paid for by an organisation you cover. Books, academic work, teaching and literary journalism are actively encouraged — several colleagues teach a term a year.
What is not permitted, for any editorial employee, is paid work for an organisation within your coverage area, writing speeches or promotional material for anyone, or accepting a fee, gift or funded trip from a body we report on. The full conflict-of-interest policy is on our editorial standards page and you will be walked through it during induction.
About four weeks from the closing date to an offer: a week to read applications, a week of first conversations, the test, then panels. Bureau roles occasionally take a week longer when travel is involved. You will hear from us at every stage, including if we are slower than we said we would be.
Everyone who applies receives a decision. Candidates who reach the test stage receive written feedback from the hiring editor within ten working days, and anyone who reaches a panel can ask for a fifteen-minute call to talk it through. We keep applications on file for twelve months, with your consent, and we do contact people again when a closer role opens.
Ready to apply?
Send a short note, a CV and three examples of your work. Every application is read by the hiring editor and everybody gets an answer. Monday to Friday, 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM IST · +91-9953590779 · info@catalystwebtrendz.com