Media Contracts Administrator

Your team: Legal

Your role: Our Contracts Administrator plays a critical role overseeing the full contractual lifecycle of freelance talent across the News UK group, including radio and TV presenters and newspaper columnists. The role involves everything from contract drafting, record-keeping and reporting to screening contractors for employment status compliance and liaising with business stakeholders on all of these functions.

The role sits within the Legal team, reporting to the Head of Employment, and works closely day to day with the Tax team on employment tax compliance. The workload breaks down into around two thirds of contracts administration and one third of tax compliance processes.

Day to day you will be:

• Drafting contractor agreements from template contracts.

• Working with Legal to keep template contracts up to date and compliant.

• Conducting regular meetings with business stakeholders to proactively manage new contract requests and ensure existing contracts are renewed on time or terminated in a legally compliant manner.

• Managing the electronic signing process through Docusign.

• Keeping a database of signed contracts and contractual information up to date.

• Conducting the initial review of contractors for employment status compliance using the company’s online onboarding programme and escalating more complex cases to Tax and Legal.

• Assisting with Status Determination Statements in compliance with the IR35 contractor tax rules.

What we’re looking for from you:

• Extremely well-organised, including excellent time management skills.

• Experienced in working with multiple departments at any one time and effectively prioritising between them.

• Attention to detail and accuracy is a must.

• Ability to create and implement clear processes, involving all stakeholders.

• Proactive and always looking for solutions.

• Flexible and resilient in a changing business environment.

• Excellent interpersonal, communication and stakeholder management skills – able to build effective relationships and shape mutually beneficial outcomes.

• Collaborates across departments to share learnings and improve processes.

• Good knowledge of Excel and Word; Experience of the Google workplace suite of applications would be an advantage but not essential.

• Experience of contract drafting and contractual principles would be an advantage but not essential

We are News UK: One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland, our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. In 2022 we launched TalkTV, a major new TV channel available to everyone across the UK, delivering a schedule of news, current affairs, entertainment and sport, with Piers Morgan in a primetime evening show. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning digital and print, audio and video, events and experiences, our brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.

Life at News: At News UK our people are our heartbeat - they are the driving force behind our brands and we want to enable people to thrive. Some of us work flexibly, in many different ways. We encourage you to talk to us about the flexibility you would like. Many of us work in a hybrid way between one of the News UK & Ireland offices and remotely.

We champion diversity and inclusion, we strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity Board, D&I strategy & training, creating more diverse content and our intern and apprenticeship programmes. We also have 11 employee-led networks.

We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK supporting the Health and Wellbeing of our staff. Some of what we offer includes:

• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;

• 25 days holiday and up to 4 volunteering days per year;

• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks;

• Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access.

• Private medical insurance covering pre-existing conditions

• Discounted gym memberships, ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual HIIT, yoga and run club classes

• ‘Bikes for Work’ scheme

• Access to wellbeing benefits such as physio/massage and counselling

We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when interviewing. Please let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.

News UK is an official partner of the Journalism Diversity Fund, founder of the Journalism and Disability Forum, and proud member of the Valuable 500. At News UK, we will continue to promote an inclusive and diverse workplace, to help people with visible and non visible disabilities create careers in media and aim to make our content accessible to all.