Job Description

Data Reporter - Property Tax

The Houston Chronicle is seeking a data reporter to produce high-impact data stories and help scale one of our most ambitious public-service projects: the Ultimate Guide to Protesting Your Property Taxes in Harris County. In 2025, the guide empowered over a million Houston-area homeowners to challenge their property valuations and save thousands on their taxes.

In this role, you will be joining the Hearst Texas Data Team, a collaborative group of journalist-programmers who partner with peers at the Austin American-Statesman, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle and Hearst DevHub to produce impactful, data-focused reporting. You will have the opportunity to pursue a mix of quick-turnaround and high-impact stories on a variety of topics, and you will receive training and mentorship working alongside award-winning data and beat reporters.

The ideal candidate will combine technical expertise with journalistic rigor and work collaboratively in a deadline-driven newsroom. Above all, we prize intellectual curiosity, resourcefulness and the ability to learn and innovate in a team environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Analyze, interpret and visualize large public datasets to produce compelling graphics- and data-driven stories
• Partner with reporters and editors across three Texas newsrooms to produce data-driven journalism on a wide range of topics from property taxes to immigration, health, public safety, business, education and more.
• Reverse-engineer and reproduce complex government algorithms.
• Build scalable data pipelines to efficiently process millions of records.
• Develop robust backend infrastructure and APIs that integrate seamlessly with existing frontend frameworks.
• Cultivate technical sources at government agencies to understand and obtain datasets on tight deadlines.

Qualifications:

Required

• A minimum of three years working in data journalism or a similar role combining journalism and programming.
• Proficiency in Python and/or R.
• Comfortable working with large, complex datasets in newsroom environments.
• Experience building APIs and backend applications.
• Experience working with data visualization tools such as Datawrapper or Adobe Illustrator/ai2html.
• Command of version control and collaborative development workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to work under tight deadlines and manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Strong news judgement.

Preferred

• Familiarity with federal and Texas open-records law.
• A track record building dynamic news elements, including but not limited to interactive graphics and newsroom tools.
• Experience with mapping tools such as ArcGIS or QGIS.
• Understanding of statistical analysis and machine learning techniques.

Additional Requirements & Information:

This role is based in Houston. To be considered you must submit all required documents in PDF format:

• One-page rsum.
• One additional page that includes: three work/character references including titles, email addresses and phone numbers, and links to at least three digital work samples.

About the Houston Chronicle:

The Houston Chronicle, recognized for its Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, serves its 2.3 million residents with content and marketing solutions across two of Houston's largest websites HoustonChronicle.com and Chron.com, along with our magazine, television and newspaper brands. Our mission is to spark conversations that inspire action to create a better Houston. All our content and the innovative business solutions we provide invite Houstonians to join conversations about a community we've been committed to covering and helping prosper for more than 120 years. The community we all call home.

About Hearst Newspapers:

With 2,500 employees across the nation, HNP encompasses a network of 24 daily and 52 weekly publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and Albany Times Union, several top digital-only news and lifestyle sites, marketing services businesses, and entertainment businesses such as King Features Syndicate.

At HNP, we are investing in new and innovative ways to tell stories growing newsrooms, diversifying tools, evolving platforms to support the millions of people who trust us each month to help them make decisions, take action and be inspired.

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