Breaking News Reporter

Date Posted	January 02, 2026
Industry	Newspapers
Specialty	Local News
Job Status	Full-time
Salary	Negotiable

Description:

You’ve met the first criteria. You clicked on our ad that said “Breaking News reporter.” We’re hoping this means you have a zeal for breaking news, an urgency to have it first, a drive to lead the coverage and get to the bottom of the story before anyone else. This will often be a crash or a murder or something worse. But Chattanooga doesn’t have more than a couple dozen murders a year, so how will you spend the rest of your time? It might be spotting a trend in crime data, finding out why there’s an uptick in one area, holding law enforcement officials to account. But you might also find other things capturing the imaginations and piquing the interest of half a million people in our coverage area. A thread on r/Chattanooga that’s out of control, a mysterious sign that’s gone up on Amnicola Highway, wrongdoing at a state agency that someone told you about over a Tectonic Session IPA at Hutton & Smith. We want you to see news where others don’t and to be skeptical of the press releases sent out whenever it suits law enforcement to do so. We want you to find our sophisticated new metrics system as addicting as TikTok and use it with precision and verve to tell our readers what they want – and need – to know. In that way, you will be indispensable to the newspaper, and we will be indispensable to the community. This is a new way to formulate a beat we used to call “general assignment.” Other papers call it the trending beat or the express desk or the surge desk. We want you to help us brand ours, and make it your own. Send me an email that tells me how you would (plus a resume).

Ricky Young

News editor

ryoung@timesfreepress.com