Public Square Amplified is a hyperlocal volunteer-driven nonprofit news organization established in October 2021 based in Newark, New Jersey. We position journalism as a civic tool and create a pipeline for a new generation of local journalists. Our reporting centers on social and economic justice, racial equity and equality, the climate crisis, and the immigrant experience in covering issues impacting and concerning citizens in and surrounding our headquarters, Newark, from the community's point of view. We're part of a statewide collaborative of 20 newsrooms designed to move us from a blog to a news dissemination platform to expand our audience and storytelling.

We're looking for a consultant to help us document and streamline our standard operating processes for our newsroom—including establishing workflow at the task-level, designating work assignments, and translating these tasks into AirTable. The individual should have a background in project management, workflow, and designing standard operating procedures with a particular interest or experience in newsrooms and journalism.

Our goal for this project is to be better able to distribute tasks among management and our growing set of community journalists and realize the ongoing mission-critical work of amplifying local community voices in New Jersey. At the completion of the project, Public Square Amplified will have an improved newsroom operating framework to help guide the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, track operational tasks, measure progress, track success, and evaluate performance. In addition to increasing the efficiency of our mission-critical work, our volunteer will have added to their portfolio a proven ability to co-manage the development of a sound operating framework, a detailed action plan for its implementation, and recommendations for an appropriate course of action to reach the desired objectives, including guidance on how to allocate resources and measure success.

Public Square Amplified operates our newsroom through AirTable from pitch submission to publication on Squarespace and outreach through Mailchimp. We currently use the following systems: pitch submission, onboarding and orientation of reporters, story assignment and editorial processes, publication processes, and publication to social media dissemination. We have many of these processes written out and already implemented, but we would like to merge these processes into a seamless workflow and onboarding process. This would create efficiencies for our writers, editors, and the overall organization. We are fully prepared to incorporate the processes into our HR handbook and to do a full orientation and ongoing workshops to solidify all processes and procedures.