Data Reporter

Data Reporter - Property Tax

Job Description

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 résumé.
• 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.

Be a part of something bigger – your headline awaits.