The Sweaty Penguin is an award-winning comedy climate program presented by PBS’s national climate initiative Peril and Promise. Through late-night-comedy-style monologues and in-depth expert interviews, The Sweaty Penguin cuts through the doom-and-gloom of the climate conversation. Our team is a small group of motivated, creative, multi-talented students and recent graduates working remotely across the continent with a variety of skill sets, and a shared passion for making climate change less overwhelming, less politicized, and more fun.
Our Journalism & Social Media Fellowship is an opportunity for college underclassmen to build a portfolio of climate news and solutions articles, develop writing, graphic design, and social media skills, and receive leadership opportunities in short order. Your day-to-day responsibilities will vary depending on your interests and skill sets, but will include some mix of writing articles, designing graphics, writing press releases and social media toolkits, and a variety of tasks around our digital and social media presence.
In 2023, we find young journalists are often expected to have experience with social media and graphic design, so we prefer applicants with some level of experience in all three of these areas. However, we will gladly review applicants who are exceptional in one or two areas rather than a jack of all trades. Let us know your interests and goals, and we’ll see if it’s a good fit!
The fellowship is a part-time, paid summer opportunity beginning in mid-May. It typically takes about 3-4 months for new team members to be properly trained to write mission-aligned content for The Sweaty Penguin and find their niche within the team. As such, we offer select opportunities for anyone who successfully completes the fellowship to advance into a longer term position on our team, tailored to both your goals and our needs.
Benefits and pay range:
🐧 $15 per hour
🐧 Remote
🐧 5-10 hours per week
🐧 Aside from required meetings, you can set your own hours
🐧 Can be flexible with vacations, with advance planning
Responsibilities and Duties will include some combination of:
🐧 Write climate news and solutions articles to be published on our website and, for exceptional work, licensed to Peril and Promise (where you would receive a byline on PBS.org)
🐧 Design graphics for use on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
🐧 Help manage The Sweaty Penguin’s website and social media accounts
🐧 Create and distribute press releases and social media toolkits around episode releases
🐧 Assist with (and potentially lead) various other audience engagement projects
Requirements and Qualifications:
🐧 College student in the class of 2026, or incoming college student in the class of 2027**
🐧 Exceptional writer
🐧 Past experience with journalism, graphic design, or social media management
🐧 Preferred: strong familiarity with WordPress, Adobe Illustrator, and/or TikTok
🐧 Passions for combating climate doom and finding bipartisan common ground on climate solutions
🐧 An affinity for leadership, teamwork, and taking initiative
🐧 A sense of humor (but don’t worry, our Comedy Writers handle the jokes!)
**Applicants must be 18 at the start of the fellowship.**
To apply, please fill out the form below and attach your resume. In lieu of a cover letter, we ask you to answer a few short answer questions and complete a writing prompt where you will be able to show off your writing skills, climate passion, and creativity. Besides the final writing prompt, please keep all other answers to 150 words or less. If you have any questions, please email Hallie Cordingley at hallie@thesweatypenguin.com
Applications officially close at 11:59pm ET on Friday, April 21, 2023. However, we plan to conduct interviews and offer positions on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply early!
Writing Prompt: Pick a past episode of The Sweaty Penguin and write a mock Twitter thread based on that episode. A Twitter thread is a series of connected tweets (each 280 characters or less), which many communicators use to break down a topic for a lay social media audience in a digestible, engaging manner. This thread is obviously not going on Twitter, but we do expect you to adhere to the same character constraints. Your thread must include a minimum of five tweets, and may include up to twenty, but remember — the longer the thread, the less likely Twitter users would be to read it all! Please type out your thread and upload it as a PDF.
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