Assignment Editor (Contract)
The Weather Company · United Kingdom
About The Weather Company:
The Weather Company is the world’s leading weather provider, helping people and businesses make more informed decisions and take action in the face of weather. Together with advanced technology and AI, The Weather Company’s high-volume weather data, insights, advertising, and media solutions across the open web help people, businesses, and brands around the world prepare for and harness the power of weather in a scalable, privacy-forward way. The world’s most accurate forecaster globally, the company reaches hundreds of enterprise clients and more than 360 million monthly active users via its digital properties from The Weather Channel (weather.com) and Weather Underground (wunderground.com).
Job brief:
As the Assignment Editor for The Weather Company’s UK desk, your job is deceptively big: while North America sleeps, you and your team are the newsroom, driving coverage for millions of users on Weather.com and The Weather Channel app. You own what publishes during the North American overnight and early-morning window. You’ll make editorial calls and package stories so that stateside readers wake up to coverage that's timely, accurate, and unmistakably useful. It's a role built on trusted editorial judgment, tight coordination across time zones, and a clear mandate to get ahead of the U.S. morning news cycle.
The impact you'll make:
Own the overnight news agenda
- Run the overnight and early-morning news agenda for North American audiences: decide what leads, what waits, and what we skip.
- Make the editorial calls on story selection and framing, with an emphasis on what users need to know as they start their day.
- Own headlines, packaging, and placement for the overnight window, and test into what grows engagement.
- Manage a clean handoff with the US desk at both ends of the window: pick up open threads at night, hand off in-progress stories in the morning.
- Keep the site and app current and credible through breaking news, severe weather, and developing stories that break while the US is offline.
- Pick up any outstanding assignments from the U.S. news team.
Level up the product
- Be a senior editorial decision-maker on shift: you set the bar for what's ready to publish and what isn't.
- Hold the line on accuracy, quality, and voice under time pressure and with limited backup.
- Know a good story and a good headline, not just a good metric, and know when a developing story is worth waking someone up for.
Coordinate across teams
- Work in close, deliberate handoff with the US newsroom, video, and product so nothing falls through the time-zone gap.
- Set a clear, repeatable handoff rhythm: what gets logged, flagged, and escalated, and to whom.
- Represent the overnight window in planning so the desk is set up ahead of known events rather than reacting to them.
Grow the audience
- Own overnight and early-morning engagement targets and treat the window as an audience to grow, not just cover.
- Turn analytics into plain, actionable calls on timing, packaging, and story mix.
- Optimize headlines, alerts, and modules for the overnight audience and build on what works.
What you've accomplished:
- 8+ years in a newsroom, including significant time making live editorial decisions on shift.
- Strong editorial judgment. You're trusted to run a desk and make the final call without a senior editor on shift.
- Experience coordinating across desks or time zones, with a knack for clean handoffs and no dropped threads.
- Comfort with audience analytics (Chartbeat, Parse.ly, GA). You read the numbers and act on them.
- Familiarity with North American news and audiences, or a demonstrable ability to get up to speed fast.
- Self-directed and calm under pressure. You thrive with autonomy, own the room, and hold standards when news breaks and no one else is online.
- Eligible to work in the UK and able to reliably cover the US overnight / early-morning window.
Nice to have
- Fluent with the latest engagement and distribution tools.
- Experience building and running workflows for a 24/7 or breaking-news operation.
- A track record of managing editorial talent across text and video.