West Coast or California Bureau Chief

About The Role

The Real Deal is seeking a West Coast or California Bureau Chief to join its growing business newsroom focused on real estate. This role involves writing original news stories, producing in-depth features for the monthly magazine, editing key market stories, and guiding coverage of the real estate industry.

The ideal candidate is a player-coach who excels at reporting their own stories while mentoring and directing other reporters. Experience in covering business, money, and power is essential, along with a passion for uncovering the inner workings of complex industries and their intersections with politics, finance, law, entertainment, and more.

A sharp news sense is required, along with experience in business journalism. Key skills include breaking news, cultivating sources, pitching story ideas, and writing clean copy on deadline. Past experience in editing news stories, guiding news teams, and mentoring is highly valued.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute two to four original articles per week to The Real Deal’s coverage of the real estate industry, with a focus on the West Coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco).
• Lead daily news scrums to direct coverage for a team of three California-based reporters.
• Pick up edits on key stories, including both breaking news and web features.
• Liaise with the New York headquarters to ensure alignment with editorial priorities.
• Occasionally contribute longer (~2,000 word) stories for The Real Deal’s monthly, national magazine.

Job Requirements

• Demonstrated writing, interviewing, and reporting skills
• Ability to produce clean, well-organized, and accurate copy on deadline, ranging from breaking news to long-form features and investigations
• Ability to write with voice and authority
• Ability to quickly learn a complex financial beat, sourcing up in the industry, and understanding residential and commercial real estate and real estate development
• Ability to lead a team, directing reporters towards important stories, identifying key narratives, and providing both conceptual feedback and practical line edits
• Understanding of and adherence to journalistic standards, ethics, and protocol
• Ability to juggle and prioritize multiple assignments
• Ability to conduct on-camera interviews, host TRD videos, and moderate live events is a plus

About Us

The Real Deal is the largest real-estate news outlet in the US, reaching millions of professionals daily through its media channels. The publication has received over 60 awards for editorial excellence in the past six years, including the General Excellence award from the Society of Business Writers and Editors.

Quantcast rates The Real Deal among the 300-most visited sites in the US, with the wealthiest audience and one of the most educated. As a publication, The Real Deal is to real estate what Variety is to entertainment or what Politico is to Beltway politics—a plugged-in news outlet read by the entire industry.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We partner with our employees to support diversity and inclusion in the workplace and through higher education programs supporting rising journalists.