Careers at Ardent Lens
A small newsroom in Accra that chose to build something slower and better rather than something faster and larger.
We hire rarely and we hire carefully. A newsroom this size has nowhere to hide a bad appointment, and every person here shapes the standard everyone else works to.
What we can offer is unusual: real editing, time to report properly, and work that is not measured by how much traffic it earned in its first day. What we cannot offer is the pace or the scale of a large newsroom, and some very good journalists would be unhappy here for exactly that reason.
The expression of interest form is not yet live on the rebuilt site. This page will carry it as soon as the submissions service behind it is deployed.
Working here
The culture is collaborative and argumentative in the useful sense. Editors push back on writers and writers push back on editors, in both directions and in public within the team. Nobody is expected to defer to a title.
The work is deep rather than broad. A staff writer here may publish two substantial pieces a month, not twenty. That is the trade, and it is deliberate: our whole proposition is that we took the time.
Roles we hire for
- Staff writers
- Reporting and long-form analysis across technology, business, current affairs, culture and sport. You will own stories from commissioning through to publication, including your own source relationships and your own research file.
- Research editors
- Building and interrogating the evidence base behind a piece: datasets, filings, legislative records, public accounts. This is the role that decides whether an argument survives contact with the material.
- Contributing analysts
- Specialists who write occasionally on their own field, on a per-piece basis, and who bring standing a generalist reporter cannot. Usually a long relationship rather than a single commission.
- Copy editors
- Line editing, house style and the last read before publication. In a newsroom this small the copy editor is frequently the person who catches the claim nobody else questioned.
What we look for
- Evidence of curiosity that predates the job. What you have investigated when nobody commissioned it tells us more than a CV.
- A demonstrated ability to hold a complex subject in plain language without flattening it.
- Comfort with being wrong in front of colleagues, and with saying so early rather than defending a draft.
- Judgement about sources: knowing the difference between what a document shows and what it is being used to imply.
- Care for the reader. Not deference, not flattery, but a real sense that someone is going to spend twenty minutes on this and deserves it to be worth their time.
What we do not hire for
- Speed alone. If your strongest claim is volume, this is the wrong newsroom.
- A following. Audience is welcome and it is not a qualification.
- Certainty as a style. Writers who cannot say "I do not know yet" struggle here.
- Willingness to write anything. A writer with no positions is not neutral, only unformed.
How we hire
The process is short and involves real work rather than hypotheticals. A first conversation about what you have done and what you want to do. A paid editorial exercise on a subject close to what the role would actually cover. A conversation about the exercise, which is usually the most informative hour of the process for both sides. Then a decision, with reasons.
We pay for the exercise because asking a journalist to work for free is not something a publication with our values should do. We give reasons when we say no because a candidate who has spent hours on us has earned an explanation.