The Upshot is hiring a staff writer

As the Saudi Premier League showers its new signings in gold-plated Lambourghinis and pet tiger cubs, we are making a marquee signing of our own.

The Upshot is hiring a Staff Writer to help spill the funniest stories in sport to our 100,000+ subscribers.

This is an opportunity for a sport-loving writer who wants to publish funny, irreverent stories for a large audience of sport fans, and experience life in a fast-growing media start-up.

If you’ve ever dreamed of spending your working hours making jokes about melodramatic tennis brats or Eric Cantona’s dress sense, then this is the role for you.

About The Upshot

The Upshot is an email newsletter which pulls back the curtain on your favourite sports and dives into all the stuff BBC and Sky wouldn’t touch with a bargepole: drunken antics, dressing room squabbles and the simmering sexual tension of the French football team.

Every Friday we send 100,000+ subscribers a digest of gossip, controversy and drama from the world of sport. Our premium Upshot Gold service gives readers four editions of the newsletter every week. And on Twitter we publish mega-popular threads about colourful characters and forgotten tales to more than 250,000 followers.

We started in 2020 to give British sports fans some respite from bland pundits and the inane wittering on social media feeds. Armed with a transfer war chest thanks to a recent injection of investment, we are aggressively growing our audience and building a media company which celebrates the lighter side of sport.

A couple of useful links:

• An archive of recent editions of The Upshot.

• A round up of our favourite stories in 2022.

The Upshot is currently a team of two working out of a co-working space in west London.

The company was started by Jack Rivlin, a former Evening Standard news reporter who also founded The Tab, a student news network backed by £7 million in investment. He sold the business in 2020.

The role

In this role, you will be responsible for entertaining a rapidly growing audience of intelligent sport fans. You’ll learn vital skills, sharpen your writing by focusing on quality over quantity, and develop your ability to tell stories in a short, colourful style.

By joining a start-up at such an early stage, you’ll experience the intoxicating feeling of growing an audience and building a business.

Pay: £25,000-30,000 depending on your experience. If you have less than a year's relevant experience, expect the bottom end.

Full time/part time: Although we envisage this as a full time role, we are open to employing on a part time basis. Please mention this in your application if it is relevant to you.

Location: We’re open to a mix of in-office and remote, depending on your circumstances. Our office is in Hammersmith/Kensington Olympia, London. Hours are 9am to 6pm.

Responsibilities: You will spend half the week finding and writing stories for our four email newsletters every week. For the remaining time, you will grow The Upshot’s subscriber base by writing Twitter threads about wild stories and characters from the world of sport.

You will:

• Find stories online and elsewhere, and write short, entertaining pieces for The Upshot's four weekly email editions.

• Write threads and find photos and videos to grow our Twitter audience.

• Trawl old newspaper archives, documentaries and books looking for forgotten tales from the past.

The ideal candidate is:

• A sharp writer who has a feel for the rhythm of short gossip stories (e.g. Private Eye, Popbitch, Guido Fawkes, diary columns), and can write clearly without resorting to awkward cliches and lame jokes.

• A huge sport (not just football) fan, who has a particular appreciation for the soap opera of sport – the gossip, drama and controversy – rather than tactical analysis.

• Someone with an irreverent sense of humour and a burning desire to make people laugh with their writing.

• The type of person who constantly looks at the audience figures and gets real satisfaction from watching them grow.

How to apply

Write two 100-200 word stories for The Upshot’s Friday email. This won’t be published, it’s just to assess your writing.

Send them to [email protected] along with a description of your relevant experience, including links to your work.

If you have any questions about your application, send them to the same email address.