Market Curation Editor (Culture)

About Meridial

Meridial places skilled, remote-first professionals into high-trust, high-precision operational roles for leading technology companies. Our teams work as an embedded extension of our clients' own product and operations organizations, holding the same quality bar and the same deadlines.

The Opportunity

As a Market Curation Editor for Culture, you'll join the Product Data Operations team supporting a new social-predictions app moving through a beta launch. An automated pipeline drafts candidate prediction markets every night; you are the human judgment layer on top of it - deciding which go live, sharpening the ones that are nearly right, and catching the markets the pipeline missed entirely. This role calls for deep, current fluency in the U.S. entertainment and cultural landscape: its shows, its stars, its fandoms, and what people are actually talking about this week.

This beta is likely to extend into a planned Phase 2 regional expansion, alongside surge periods around awards season and major season finales. ** Will be removed prior to posting

What You'll Do

• Review a daily queue of system-generated culture markets against a fixed completion deadline.
• Assess each candidate for factual accuracy, clarity, and whether the resolution criteria can actually be adjudicated - often the hardest part in culture, since release dates move, awards categories change, and charts revise their methodology.
• Verify that open and close timing matches the real event: an announcement, a broadcast, a release, a ceremony.
• Make the relevance call - decide whether a market is genuinely live right now, or technically correct but culturally dead. This judgment is the core of the role.
• Confirm policy fit against community standards and content guidelines. Culture sits closest to the line on markets about real people - escalate anything touching private life, health, minors, grief, or unverified allegations rather than making an unsupported call.
• Approve, edit, or reject each candidate, recording a structured reason every time - this record is a product deliverable, not admin.
• Rewrite questions and resolution language for precision and for how fans actually talk, including fandom vocabulary a generic writer would get wrong.
• Author timestamped clarifications when ambiguity emerges in a live market, and handle settlement on markets with no authoritative feed.
• Run proactive gap scans across social platforms, fan communities, and entertainment press for culturally live moments the pipeline missed.
• Participate in weekly calibration reviews to stay consistent with published guidelines and fellow curators.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years in entertainment journalism, editorial, social or community management, or a comparable role requiring current subject-matter expertise.
• Demonstrable current fluency in U.S. entertainment culture - television, film, music, celebrity, and fandom landscape - following it now, not historically.
• Working knowledge of the U.S. media landscape: which outlets break news, which are reliable, and which announcements are real versus speculative.
• Sound judgment on ambiguity: rumor versus confirmation, shifting release dates, contested awards outcomes, revised chart methodology.
• Ability to interpret sources quickly and reach a defensible determination.
• Exceptional written precision under deadline - able to write unambiguous rules that hold up after the outcome is known.
• Strong instinct for where a market about a real person crosses from public interest into private life, and the discipline to escalate rather than guess.
• Availability for evening, overnight, and weekend work around live events.

Nice to Have

• Current or former entertainment journalist (outlets in the vein of Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, People, BuzzFeed News, or a relevant Substack).
• Experience trading on, participating in, or otherwise familiar with the workings of prediction markets.
• Prior work in a newsroom, or managing large social platforms for a news or entertainment brand with a hard daily deadline.
• Familiarity with content policy, moderation frameworks, or editorial standards - especially around coverage of private individuals.
• A track record of spotting trends and big moments forming in real time.
• Experience contributing to guidelines, style guides, or annotation standards.
• Genuine, active standing in high-velocity digital communities or fandoms (reality TV, gaming, streaming, pop culture) as evidence of real-time fluency, not just a formal credential.

How We'll Measure Success

• Consistent completion of the daily queue against the deadline.
• Decision quality - agreement with peers and the lead on calibration samples, and a low rate of published markets requiring void, amendment, or resettlement.
• Reason quality - structured rejection reasons that are specific and correctly categorized.
• Rewrite quality - published questions that survive contact with the outcome without dispute.
• Proactive contribution - culturally live moments you surface that the pipeline didn't generate.