Brown and Engima partner for unique internship!

Enigma and The Brown Institute for Media Innovation are hiring a graduating student from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to work as Fellow for a period of three months beginning sometime in the Summer or Fall of 2017. The Fellow will work at the Enigma offices near Madison Square Park in New York City. The deadline to apply is April 3, 2017!

Enigma started with the idea that there is an enormous quantity of hidden knowledge locked away in public data silos and obscure formats, waiting to be released. The company is building data discovery and analytics tools that make it simpler for organizations to understand their own private data; and for the wider community to explore and build on Enigma’s own integrated public platform, linking data from federal, state, local and international government sources.

With this Fellowship, The Brown Institute and Enigma are combining efforts to introduce the idea of “narrative” into the all stages of the data pipeline. Where do data come from? How are they organized? What algorithms are used to recognize “entities” across different databases? At each stage in the process, a narrative perspective helps designers, engineers and end users tell better stories.

Scope of the role and prerequisites

This fellowship seeks an individual interested in engaging with data on one of two beats: either healthcare or issues surrounding financial sanctions as a tool of foreign policy, anti-terror and antiorganized crime efforts. The ideal candidate will have experience producing content on regular deadlines and thrive in a self-directed environment.

The Fellow will spend some amount of time finding stories in the vast collection of data offered by Enigma. They will also explore how decisions in data collection and organization affects the different kinds of stories that can be told. Perhaps it’s best to think of this Fellowship as a kind of “Journalist in Residence.” As such, the ideal candidate has a background in data and computation as well as strong reporting and writing experience.

The Fellow must be a student or graduate of Columbia Journalism School. They must be reasonably fluent in a programming language for data manipulation — R and Python are fine examples. They must also be skilled at reporting and writing, with some experience using data to find and tell stories. The Fellow will work as a full-time, temporary employee of Enigma and will be paid a gross amount of $1,200 per week.

How to Apply

To apply, upload a resume and 3 examples of your written work (links or PDFs), including data related publications or visualizations. The link is https://brown.submittable.com/submit and the deadline is April 3, 2017.