Hearst Magazines

Community Manager, Puzzles – SFGate, Part-Time

Your impact

As SFGate’s Community Manager, Puzzles, you’ll find creative ways to convert many of our 30 million+ monthly news readers into active puzzle players and expand SFGate’s passionate puzzle-loving community. A key part of this effort includes helping to develop the strategy for audience growth and retention, including ways to drive more readers into the puzzle funnel and keep existing players active and coming back for more. This is a temporary, part-time (20 hours/week) for six months with the potential to become a permanent hire.

What You’ll Do

Community Building & Engagement

• Cultivate an active, respectful, and enthusiastic community on SFGate.com.
• Create and moderate online events, challenges, and puzzle drops to spark engagement.
• Act as a direct liaison between the playing audience and our team — surfacing feedback, reporting bugs, and sharing insights and recommendations for improvements.

Audience Strategy & Growth

• Own and execute strategies to grow our audience.
• Develop retention initiatives — like newsletters, in-game shoutouts, community badges, and loyalty rewards.
• Use analytics to understand audience behavior, segment users, and improve engagement across the funnel.

Content & Communication

• Assign puzzle builds to a pool of creators and make edits, facilitate payments & coordinate puzzle rollout and promotion plans.
• Write compelling posts, community updates, and announcements that reflect our brand voice.
• Collaborate with design, marketing, and product teams to ensure messaging is on point and consistent.
• Celebrate community wins—spotlight creators, top solvers, and long-time fans.

Who you are:

• You have 3+ years experience in community management or audience development.
• You have a love for puzzles, games, and digital product solutions designed to engage readers.
• You have deep familiarity with Discord, Reddit, and other community platforms.
• You have strong writing chops — you know how to engage online communities with personality and voice.
• You have experience interpreting community data to guide decisions and strategy, and have moderated communities or worked in gaming, tech, or fan-centered brands.
• You live in the San Francisco Bay Area or are willing to move here.
• You’ve read SFGate and understand the voice and brand.

In accordance with applicable law, Hearst is required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role if hired in California. The reasonable estimate is between $73,000 and $80,000 for a full-time role. Please note this information is specific to those hired in San Francisco. If this role is open to candidates outside of San Francisco, the salary range would be aligned to that specific location. A final decision on the successful candidate’s starting salary will be based on a number of permissible, non-discriminatory factors, including but not limited to skills and experience, training, certifications, and education.

About The San Francisco Chronicle & SFChronicle.com:

The San Francisco Chronicle is world-class journalism. With name-brand voices and a keen editorial eye, The Chronicle is an authority that still surprises. The Chronicle, one of the largest news organizations in the West, has been named California's best large newsroom for four of the past five years.

SFChronicle.com is home to the Bay Area's best journalism and has been recognized as the best large newspaper website in California. It is the Bay Area's authoritative online news source, focused on San Francisco but inclusive of all California and Western news that reflects the unique Bay Area experience.

Join our team of world-class journalists!

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