Catch-22 in journalism internships
Go to work for 10 or 12 or 15 weeks without any pay.
Give up your ability to work full-time and save money for the coming school year.
Pay rent in two places, if you can’t sublet your costly university-town apartment.
And — oh, yeah — pay for three academic credits (at full price) at your university while you’re doing it.
Like all journalism professors in North America, we tell our students they must, must, must get at least one internship before they graduate.
In a March 21 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (republished at the SPJ site), Ben Yagoda (an English professor at the University of Delaware), gives up the straight dope on why our kids have to pay to not get paid.
The gist: Because the news organizations are too damned tight-fisted to pay even minimum wage to college students learning their trade — when it is the news organizations’ own requirement that they will not hire fresh grads who never had an internship — they were violating federal labor laws when they failed to require that the intern was simultaneously signed up (and paying) for college credits.
So nowadays, they require the unpaid interns to be taking internship credits.
I know the news business is in trouble. I know the ad revenues are dropping and the subscriber base is shrinking. But guys, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Many of the kids who cannot afford to take an internship under these conditions are our very best students — the ones you need to save this business. The wealthy ones who can afford it are not always our hardest workers or our most creative thinkers.
This is a much greater problem with TV interns (not sure about radio). Even when I was in college in the 80s, TV interns were expected to work for free while newspaper interns were usually paid.
At Eastern, we have a state grant that allows us to pay 50 percent of the salary for a summer intern, with the company putting in the other 50 percent.
I always found it ironic that TV stations – which clear more money on ads and have smaller news staffs than newspapers, were the ones who didn’t pay.
March 31, 2008 at 9:19 amYou should see the obscene amount of money Northwestern makes its students pay. In my case at UF when I did a gig at the Miami Herald, I only had to drop a few hundred dollars and was able to stay at my parents’ house. Other students aren’t so lucky.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a bureaucrat, but I don’t see a good reason as to why universities need to charge their students full tuition for those credits.
March 31, 2008 at 9:35 am@Bryan: TV news staffs have always been a small fraction of the size of newspaper staffs (in comparable markets), so maybe it’s a matter of budget allocation.
@Danny: There’s no way the university is going to offer a tuition discount for certain kinds of credit hours, especially in these economic times. The current argument in the Florida legislature over distance learning fees is a case in point.
March 31, 2008 at 9:59 amthe ones you need to save this business.
If by ’save this business’ you mean return to profitability by emphasizing content over timeliness and presentation then I hope you’re right but I fear you’re wrong.
If by save this business you mean increase profitability by blogifying the news and embracing this race to the bottom then why do they need these bright young journalists at all?
March 31, 2008 at 10:45 amWhen I say “save this business,” I mean journalism — the accurate transmission of information about the world we live in, to help us understand the world and our role in it.
For this business to continue, the journalists have to be able to continue to work, and to be paid to do their work.
There can be no journalism without journalists.
(I believe citizens can commit valuable acts of journalism, but they are not sufficient to ensure the survival of journalism.)
March 31, 2008 at 11:43 amI know I’m not the only student who won’t entertain the idea of an unpaid internship. It’s just not feasible.
I’d much rather pursue a personal project I’m passionate and really want to work on than be in an environment where my work is perceived to be of no value. Is that wrong of me?
Our faculty encourages us not to even apply to such places.
March 31, 2008 at 11:58 amI wish I could give this post a standing ovation.
March 31, 2008 at 12:05 pmThank you, thank you, thank you. This has been the biggest problem for me. I can’t afford unpaid internships because I can’t afford paying two rents and also feeding myself in summer that I’m not on assistantship. As an international student, I am not allowed to get paid out of campus, so I have to register for internship credits if I want to get paid. Since my tuition will be out of state, in fact I should pay more to register than what I will be paid! So, even with paid internships, I should still pay out of my pocket some hundreds of dollars. Of course I should eventually pay this money and get at least one internship or I should kiss getting hired goodbye. Why nobody does the simple math?
March 31, 2008 at 12:34 pmWhen I see an internship that says unpaid, I click away.
When I see one that say for academic credit, I run away.
March 31, 2008 at 12:54 pmMindy – I agree with your post completely – but this comment threw me:
>>There’s no way the university is going to offer a tuition discount for certain kinds of credit hours, especially in these economic times.
At the risk of sounding like a publisher – the ‘economic times’ we are in seem to mean that many papers either have cna have unpaid internships or can lay-off staff and have paid interns instead.
March 31, 2008 at 1:05 pmI’m a big fan of internships as part of the college experience, but maybe that’s because my short teaching practicum during my senior year made me realize that I didn’t have the stamina for that sort of job.
I’d love to see more internships and similar programs early on in one’s college career (i.e. before you’re tied to a major).
However, the issues you mentioned do pose a serious problem — and are why I didn’t take any of the many internships that I wanted.
One idea I had was that internships should be worth 1 credit hour so that they’re cheap — or even 0 credit hours (I’ve had a class like that, so maybe it’s possible). However, the problem then is how to qualify for scholarships as a full time student when you’re spending so much time at an internship. I’ve run into that problem a lot while taking music classes (nothing like taking 7 courses for 12 hours credit — especially when classes meet more than once a week).
Perhaps the best solution would be for companies to grant scholarships for the tuition. I know they’re tightwards, but really, it’s the least they should do. Of course, why should they change so long as there are students who can ‘afford’ to work for free (thanks to their parents or student loans or whatever).
March 31, 2008 at 1:33 pm@Damon: I know what you mean — but let’s imagine the math. One intern for 10 weeks. 40 hours x 10 = 400 hours. 400 x $7/hour = $2,800.
That’s not a salary. That’s the meeting at corporate your publisher attended last month. For two days. Airfare, hotel, and meals. You know, with the alcohol included.
March 31, 2008 at 1:41 pmMeg wrote: Perhaps the best solution would be for companies to grant scholarships for the tuition.
Don’t forget RENT. Many of our students foot a bill for $600 (and up) per month for the apartment in Gainesville they’re not living in while they are away at the internship. For heaven’s sake, put the kid up in some editor’s spare bedroom during the internship. Or something!
March 31, 2008 at 1:45 pmMindy,
Fantastic post. I’ve been hearing this for awhile from journalism students and recent grads. I may make my own post about it later.
But the issue is very real. The vast majority of students are not wealthy, and the proposition of an unpaid internship is almost unfeasible for most of them. This means that many of the most talented — if not a vast majority of — journalism students cannot partake in necessary and often critical internships (what paper would honestly hire someone who wasn’t even an intern?).
I have seen many of the best journalism students graduate and go into other fields, and certainly this is one of the reasons why. Imagine this: how well do you honestly think a company that doesn’t even pay interns (for actual work, unlike many internships) will pay when you’re a full-time employee? Not well.
Your proposed $7 an hour is still pretty laughable. Students can make much more waitressing or being a barista (which makes it even more egregious that newspapers can’t even pay anything to interns who produce real copy). My engineering friends often had internships that paid $20+ an hour. Those companies realized that internships were a great scouting and recruiting tool. And those companies are not hurting for intelligent and enterprising candidates.
Is it any wonder that many recent graduates wish they were working for 70s-era newspapers? The most intelligent and inventive students long ago realized that working for a newspaper was a bad idea. Most of what is left are students who just want go about the daily grind of putting out a deadtree publication, while pretending that the Internet doesn’t exist.
Maybe it’s an indictment of my intelligence that I still work for a newspaper, but I am not surprised in the least of the lack of innovation at most newspapers. It starts with getting the best and brightest young minds. Many of those top students are embarking into new media paths, because those opportunities offer a chance for real innovation — and journalism salvation.
In short, newspapers are screwed and they have no one to blame but themselves. This is just another example of a horrifically stupid policy/idea that is killing newspapers.
March 31, 2008 at 2:21 pmJust a quick note: My newspaper does pay interns, and I know of others that do as well. In fact, it seems that the larger the publication the less likely it is to pay interns.
March 31, 2008 at 2:24 pmI get the sense that people in the journalism industry want to educate people who don’t really want to be educated. By educate, I mean, provide them with journalistic information. By “don’t really want to be educated” I mean “more interested in reading blogs.”
I had to add those translations because I *DON’T* think trained journalists are much better at providing good information than bloggers. What they are good at is sacrificing enough of themselves to get into a position where some of their valuable work (researching and writing) can find its way to a paying audience. Bloggers do it for free. Of course, 99 percent of them write crap. That’s information overload. It is the lurking and cancerous problem that is not yet being addressed head on.
March 31, 2008 at 3:07 pmThe publishing industry (fiction and non-fiction) has a strangle-hold on the solution to the information overload problem. Innovation, competition, free trade, and a willingness to let people who don’t want to be educated SUFFER for it is what is required. Litmocracy is trying to break it. Wanna help?
At one of my former papers we had an intern living out of his van for a summer because they didn’t pay him enough (or at all, I don’t recall).
He’d use an editors house when he needed a shower, or would house sit for close to free.
March 31, 2008 at 4:46 pmReal gutzy article. Having worked at a bigger newspaper chain and now at a radio station and two TV stations I’ve experienced different sides of this. At my previous newspaper job we used to pay our interns, but where I currently work we don’t. It’s company policy.
It’s not necessarily true that you get better interns if you pay them. I think they unpaid ones are here solely because they want to learn. I’ve been real surprised with the quality of the interns we’ve gotten.
I think interns need to look at not just the money, but also what they will get out of the internship. If there’s value there, it might be worth it. It would be much better to get a great job where you get to learn a lot than to get a paid job where your tasks are menial.
March 31, 2008 at 5:22 pm@Ray
Just because someone can’t work for free doesn’t make them any more or less motivated.
March 31, 2008 at 7:36 pm@Ray: I agree, you have to REALLY WANT IT if you’re willing to do it for free (hm, that sounds a little sketchy, doesn’t it?) … but some students truly cannot afford to work for free. Not everyone has a van to live in. Or a tent. Or wherever it is the news organizations think the kids can live for no rent.
Some of them are carrying some hefty loans too.
The end result is that those students are driven out of journalism if they cannot get one of the paying internships.
March 31, 2008 at 9:12 pmI’m Junior interning at Washpost online this summer in photo/multimedia. . . arguably one of the best places to be for a visual journalist and its still an unpaid internship!
I’ve interned SKI magazine before–a much smaller outfit with what seemed less funding, and at a non-profit, both as a photographer, and those were paid.
What makes it worse is that I’ve heard their print interns are some of the best paid out there. I don’t know if thats 100% true, but having a friend who worked as a print designer there I know they get a decent salary.
I’m still incredibly excited to be working there this summer, and thankfully I won’t be doing a 40hr week, and am not forced to do it for credit. That being said, I’d gladly work the 40hrs and more if it meant I wouldn’t need a second job and a loan to pay for my rent this summer.
March 31, 2008 at 9:30 pmDarn, you always notice the grammar errors after clicking “submit!”
March 31, 2008 at 9:32 pmCouple of idealistic ideas, from a class last semester: Could we have a New Deal for journalism? And could students studying abroad fill the widening gaps in the foreign press corps?
http://snurl.com/2349l
http://snurl.com/2349o
March 31, 2008 at 10:38 pm@Andria: Neat ideas — ever hear of the Knight News Challenge grants?
March 31, 2008 at 11:35 pmExcellent post. Since jobs go to people who are able to take advantage of internships, the end result is that many students from poor or minority backgrounds simply miss out, and go into other careers that don’t require an unpaid or minimally paid apprenticeship. The job pool is then skewed and papers miss out on whole segments of society and rich story sources. Not only do newspaper companies miss out, but readers are worse off.
April 1, 2008 at 6:58 amNow I’ve done internships and I’ve supervised interns so I guess I’m part of the system but quite frankly it stinks. A couple of years ago I was doing internships to try to crack into a new field; at one point I considered turning one really great work placement down because I was having serious trouble paying the bills. Good thing I didn’t, because that placement got me the job I’m in now (and I’m still paying off the debts from that summer). Now if someone like me – relatively experienced, middle-class, white, with quite a lot of support from wife and family – is facing these choices, I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone who doesn’t have such advantages.
Mindy, you’re absolutely right. I’ve had this discussion over and over again for years at all my places of employment. The argument always breaks along economic lines (but you usually have to dig it out). Those who are from wealthy families say unpaid internships are OK. Those who are or were working class, working their way through college or not from the monied classes who say it’s a reprehensible practice. I side with the latter.
April 1, 2008 at 5:50 pmAmen. This is a great blog post. As someone who paid her own way through school, and could not afford unpaid internships, I can sympathize so much with students today.
It’s so easy for people with ample savings to say, “suck it up” to students. And many students are lucky enough to have their parents finance their summer internships.
But what about those who don’t have such an option? I fear that unpaid internships promote a certain class bias among journalists, not intentionally, for sure, but it’s there just the same.
I am a business journalist now — and loving it! — because a business journalism internship was the only type that paid. (Thank you Washington Business Journal!)
April 1, 2008 at 5:54 pmI had two unpaid internships in college. I got a job nannying at night to put a roof over my head and was grateful for the experience, which got me bylines in papers all over the country. I also watched friends take positions that involved less writing and fewer employment payoffs in the end. Five years out of college, I became an editor at a mid-sized daily. When people ask how I got so far seemingly so fast in newsrooms, I always tell them it’s because I found a way to work in real newsrooms while in college. Internships that allow students and newsrooms to take chances on one another create new generations of newsroom leaders. The solution is not to eliminate these unpaid positions or let them die off, but to figure out how to help motivated, promising students get through the process. Maybe journalists could allow interns to live in their homes for those few months, or colleges could give students the choice to count their internships for credit.
April 1, 2008 at 5:57 pmWell, I guess I’ll share my internship story. I had an unpaid internship at The Village Voice in New York for a whole summer, while I was enrolled at Penn State, and I paid for the three credits as required.
I paid $300/month (25 years ago) to sleep on the FLOOR in my friend’s studio apartment. My internship supervisor, knowing I was living on ramen noodles and pizza slices, found a lot of freelance work for me — mostly proofreading for Film Comment magazine, and one memorable stint folding posters and stuffing press kits for George Romero’s “Creepshow.”
I had the greatest summer, learned a ton, got not a single byline, and didn’t starve. My supervisor was Tom Allen, one of the very best teachers I ever had. He bought me many a slice, and often a hot dog and a Gray’s papaya, and one time memorably said, “You’ve never, ever seen ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’? Oh, how I envy you!” as I was leaving the office to go and watch it.
Rest in peace, Tom! I never did become a film critic, but in the end, it turned out okay.
April 1, 2008 at 6:59 pmNearly all of my internships were paid. It wasn’t easy, but I found internships that were paid by applying for any program I could find. I lived in my college apartment one summer, commuted 30 miles every day to intern for my first internship, worked for a little over minimum wage and made it with a roommate.
I was also part of a summer copy editing internship program at a large metro paper that ensured good pay for interns, after applying for several national programs.
For my final internship, I worked at the paper in my university city unpaid, but I worked 20+ hours/week, and got credit for it while I was taking 18 credit hours my last semester in school.
It’s difficult, but the most resourceful students can probably find paid internships. Aren’t those resourceful ones the best reporters/copy editors anyway?
April 1, 2008 at 7:01 pmIt’s pathetic that employers offer students internships without pay. And I recognize the value of internships to students as they complete their education and prepare for careers. I teach public relations at Kent State University. We require an internship for graduation. Previously, I was vice president of corporate communications for The BFGoodrich Company. We “hired” plenty of interns — but everyone was paid. Fortunately, 90 to 95 percent of our public relations internships at Kent State are paid. But for the rest — and for the other examples mentioned throughout this conversation — to me it is just wrong to offer unpaid internships. Is it beyond the ability of any organization to offer students at least some minimum wage for their professional services? C’mon folks. They are the next generation of journalists, public relations practitioners, advertising professionals, etc.
Rob Jewell
April 1, 2008 at 8:22 pmDuring high school, I had the chance to intern at a local paper’s communications department and write for their internal newsletter during the summer. My salary? $7.50/hour. The same amount that the college intern working beside me made, and the same amount I would make if I went back there again. My latest pay rate at a retail job with no higher education? $9.50/hour. Not a huge difference, but it says something.
April 1, 2008 at 9:07 pmMy first (and only) internship at a small CT daily back in the summer of 1974 was one of the best experiences of my life because it required covering everything from cops and politics to potluck suppers and the weather. It gave me an advantage in getting an actual fulltime job upon graduation.
Fast-forward to 2008. With the guy who repairs my motorcycle getting $75 per hour and the carpenter who does some fix-up on my house getting $65 an hour, as much as I love journalism and writing, I often wish that I’d taken a different career path. Freelance assignments today sometimes pay less than minimum wage when the required hours get factored in, and that’s often the only work available in a rapdily shrinking newspaper world.
Am I bitter? Heck no. I still have the enthusiasm that I had for the profession more than 30 years ago – and an empty bank acount to prove it.
April 2, 2008 at 10:50 amAs a student at Northwestern I had the choice of taking advanced reporting on campus and writing stories for a professor or going on an unpaid Teaching Newspaper internship where I wrote stories for a real editor that were published. It caused some financial hardship, but seemed like a no-brainer. The experience I got at the Dubuque Telegraph Herald was invaluable. As a director of photography in Pittsburgh, I used academic internships to give students from local universities a chance to work in a real newsroom. We provided equipment, editing and helped each student build a portfolio. I only selected students who were already living in the area. Union rules required them to get academic credit for their work. We did away with our summer internship and began a two-year associate program. That allowed us to hire outstanding college students straight out of school and give them meaningful experience at a metro newspaper. They had to leave after two years and worked for less pay than journeymen, but every one built a strong portfolio and has remained in the industry. Now as a senior lecturer at Mindy’s alma mater (Penn State) I face a different challenge. Our best photojournalist can’t afford a car (much less cameras) and has had to turn down several internships. One of our strongest reporters was turned down for a news magazine internship because she couldn’t afford to work for nothing through the summer in Manhattan. The industry is poorer for their absence.
April 2, 2008 at 11:50 am@Curt: That’s the kind of story we can tell here at the University of Florida too. Not everyone has wealthy parents. Not everyone has a state-funded scholarship. Sure, some kids here drive Hummers and BMWs — but not many of THEM want to go into journalism. The kid without a car is really at a disadvantage.
April 2, 2008 at 12:24 pmMay I put in a plug for the Scripps Howard Foundation Semester in Washington year-round internship program? We pay stipends – $2,350 for the spring and fall 14-week terms and $1,800 for the 10-week summer term – and provide free housing in apartments near the National Zoo. (And the foundation buys lunch at least once a week.) It’s not a huge sum, but it has allowed students who cannot afford to work for free to at least break even.
Some students take our internship for credit, meaning they do have to pay tuition, but others are here for the experience of reporting in Washington. Maintaining scholarships during the fall and spring terms drives a lot of students to apply only for the summer term, when I turn away many qualified students. I’d love to see more flexibility from colleges on that issue so more students could apply for fall and spring.
I’ll post 2009 program dates and application deadlines on our Web site over the summer: http://www.shfwire.com
April 2, 2008 at 12:32 pm[...] Catch-22 in journalism internships. There’s a great discussion going on over at Mindy’s place about the issue of paid (and unpaid) journalism internships as requirements from j-school grads, something that’s much on my mind these days. Much wisdom in the comments. [...]
April 2, 2008 at 3:07 pmStanford Chen, a well-regarded editor and reporter for The Oregonian and beloved Asian American Journalism Association mentor, knew well the financial challenges some j students face trying to develop their skills.
April 2, 2008 at 5:37 pmThat’s why the Stanford Chen Internship fund grant program was developed in honor of Chen, who died of cancer in 1999. It provides up to three grants a year to student members of AAJA who have landed internships in small markets but need help with living, transportation and other expenses.
For more information on the program, visit http://www.aaja.org
–Maya Blackmun, committee coordinator of the Stanford Chen Internship Grant
I teach “Communications Internships” at a college in Atlanta. Students get 2 credits for the course and 2 credits for a 12-week unpaid internship. One of the employers was not satisfied with 12 weeks of free labor; it actually tried to bully students into staying an extra month. Sheesh!
April 2, 2008 at 6:51 pmI suspect the TV stations/newspapers could pay for the units; there’s no law I’m aware of against that.
I hate to say this about my former field, but it’s a very simple situation of supply and demand. There are more people who want internships than there are internships, which was true when I went to college back in 1982. And there are people who will work for free, and even pay to work! It’s only getting worse. If you let them get away with it, you’re part of the problem. Change fields while you can!!
April 2, 2008 at 10:41 pm[...] my internships post is still relatively fresh, I’d like to offer something else to journalism students who are [...]
April 3, 2008 at 12:49 am[...] McAdams’ awesome blog, Teaching Online Journalism, featured a post about journalism internships. My favorite part came at the [...]
April 3, 2008 at 1:47 amMost newspaper internships are paid, and they pay just fine. I’ve done four. I don’t think this post applies to newspaper internships as much as it does to TV.
April 3, 2008 at 2:42 am[...] been on a tear lately. First it was internships, now it’s grad school. I mostly agree with her advice. However, I also think there is a place [...]
April 3, 2008 at 11:24 am[...] Mindy McAdams has a post about how many journalism internships don’t pay, yet internships are a requirement for employment at most journalism companies. [...]
April 3, 2008 at 1:38 pmI confess that I advise my students to take the unpaid internships. I feel bad doing it, but here’s why:
1. We’re not a top-tier j-school. My kids need to compete with students from those schools. They have to show they’ll jump higher, work harder and learn more. So I advise them to first take the no-pay, for-credit internships in town. If they can’t afford it during the summer, most of the media firms here will allow students to intern during the school year.
2. There’s lots of local opportunity. We’re in a town with 28 Gannett weeklies, one daily, and a lifestyle weekly; a growing newspaper web-only site that emerged when a competing daily’s JOA ended; three network TV stations and two independents; one alternative weekly; a monthly city magazine; and several smaller mags and e-zines. There’s also a smaller daily and some weeklies run by Cox not far away. My kids get the work by agreeing to the for-credit gig — often besting the more accomplished students from the better j-schools. Sometimes, they write internship proposals for editors — who love them — and get the internships that way.
3. After a year or two of unpaid work, armed with better clips or URLs, my students aim for the paid gigs. They usually get them. When the ygraduate, they usually have more outside journalism experience than those students from the j-schools. I am always complemented on my students’ work ethic. One editor said recently, “Your students don’t have any ‘attitude.’ I like that.”
April 3, 2008 at 2:06 pmGayle brings up a very good point — if a student can complete an unpaid internship close to home or school, it can open the door to better, paid internships. The earlier the students starts doing internships, the more internships s/he can complete before graduation.
April 3, 2008 at 8:18 pm[...] and work part or full time. Some even do all of this and join the student newspaper or magazine (as Mindy McAdams wrote in the best journalism-related post all [...]
April 4, 2008 at 1:14 amMindy:
As you know, I’m the editor of The High Springs Herald, a weekly newspaper just a half-hour away from the University of Florida. We use interns extensively, offering internships to five students or so each semester.
We have the good fortune of being driving distance from UF and working around students’ work and class schedules (within reason).
But for most weekly newspapers, interns are out of the question. Weekly newspaper — which often can provide a better internship than a daily because of the variety of work an intern will do — get by from week to week and can’t afford to pay an intern.
I always suggest to weeklies that they attend the University of Florida’s internship fair held twice each year and advertise they are looking for students whose hometown is the same as the newspaper’s. This way, students can live at home while getting a quality internship.
Heck, even the Florida Press Association comes to each internship fair and interviews students, then sends the results of those interviews to interested newspapers.
But weekly newspaper editors are so traditionaly overworked that they have little time to travel to UF for a daylong internship fair. But they need to make the time.
Quality interns can help free up some of the weekly’s overworked staffers to work on long-terms projects that you so rarely see in weeklies. And the interns get in-depth experience, covering everything from city commission meetings to birthdays of 100-year-olds.
Producing a quality internship is a lot of work. At The Herald, where we’ve had more than 75 interns in the past five years, we hold a staff meeting every Thursday at 9:30 a.m. In that staff meeting, we not only hand out the week’s stories but talk about challenges any of us may have faced. We also point out great writing and compare our stories with those of competitor’s.
Further, not a single intern’s story — not one — gets published in The High Springs Herald until it is edited by me WITH the intern. Sometimes the intern is actually present with me in the room. More often than not, the intern is one the phone with me (saving them gas money). They open up their story on their computer and follow along with me as I edit their story on my computer. This way, when they open the paper Thursday, there are NO surprises.
Further, I NEVER re-write anything. Yes, we do normal editing together, but if an intern turns in something so horrible that it needs to be rewritten, we talk about ways the story could be rewritten. Then I instruct the intern to begin that process and let me know once they have a new product.
This way, if an employer ever calls me down the road for a reference for a former intern and says, “How much of what they wrote is you rewriting their material,” I can say with certainty, “None of it.”
Because I’ve heard the complaint that journalism colleges graduate great feature writers but inexperienced news writers, every intern at The Herald is required to cover a selected city commission in concert with the full-time, professional reporter who normally covers that city.
This way, throughout the course of 3-4 months, the intern gets several, if not a dozen or more, city commission meetings under their belt. They learn how to take long, boring meetings and find the meat that is important to the readers. They learn the art of hard-core news writing.
Finally, as part of a personal philosophy I have, I try each semester to pick three highly experienced interns with great clips, plus two interns with no clips and no experience.
After all, if you can’t get your first experience at a weekly newspaper, where are you supposed to get experience? Yes, working with total novices can be tough, but the rewards are great when you seem them begin to mature and blossom.
I treasure our interns, and we even started a Facebook group where we keep in touch with our interns and follow them as they move forward in the professional world.
An excellent internship program, while a lot of work, can be something wonderful for both the newspaper and the student.
April 4, 2008 at 3:02 pmRonald…you are the kind of caring individual the industry needs more of…as a professional journalist and an adjunct J instructor, I salute you.
ken
April 4, 2008 at 6:03 pmIt’s quite obvious to me that one of the main goals of journalism these days is to diversify. How can the field possibly be making any progress when the prevalence of unpaid internships eliminates certain groups from the running? Graduates need experience to get the job. They need internships to get the experience. They need to be paid to afford to live. What is happening to students like me who can barely afford college, let alone an unpaid internship? Goodbye diversity…
April 12, 2008 at 1:43 amI agree with you, but as a producer working in TV news, the money is drying up for ANYTHING extra. We are doubling up just from what we did last year. I now produce two newscasts daily when two people were doing that last year. Money for training is out of the budget. Heck! We have even had our coffee cups and plastic forks in the break room cut out. The janitor has been fired. The TV business is not going to add any other costs to the bottom line, no matter how much the business might benefit in the future. People running the show are concerned about today, and trying to even be in business tomorrow. I agree 100% with your point of cutting off the nose in spite the face, but the bottom line is, I’m not sure management is concerned about QUALITY as it is about getting more work done for less money. There is some GREAT NEWS though. As the internet becomes more and more important in the news business, it will become cheaper and cheaper for smart people to become successful online without caring what a corporate boss is thinking about the future of the business. Matt Drudge is an example of this. http://www.DrudgeReport.com would not be what it is if it were started in a newsroom. But it has become one of the biggest sources of news in the country for journalists.
Raymond
June 10, 2008 at 4:10 amI am in this situation at this very moment. When I went to the Bursar’s Office to find that not only will I be paying $755.40 for my Professional Seminar class, but $2141.40 for the nine credit internship. Why am I paying for experience? But here’s the real kicker, I work 40 hours/week and get paid for 10 hours. I have to eat and pay $550 for rent. It is certainly something that needs to be changed.
June 12, 2008 at 10:01 amI am not a writer as you can tell, so please bear with me.
I found this blog while researching to gain an understanding of internships as I am in need of content for my web sites.
I refuse to enter into any situation that is not a win win win situation for the student, consumer and me so I am doing my research in an effort to create that.
You all have valid points. However, some of your opinions are a bit short sited, the carpenter, mechanic plumber… that makes a nice hourly wage typically puts in 10-30 hours a week that is not on the clock. They also need to pay to learn.
For me I have invested over 17 months of my time in these web sites and paid for the opportunity. I have faith that it will be fruitful. It is where my heart is and I am willing to do it.
The catch 22 is not exclusive to your trade.
For the people that have never run a business you need to understand that not every business is capitalized well enough to pay to provide opportunity, in your case to be published.
Thank you again for the knowledge you have given me via this blog.
Have a great day and follow the path of your dreams with every conscionable means you discover.
PRESS ON
October 3, 2008 at 12:07 amNothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
[...] may seem like another cost, another obstacle to your dream. That’s because it is. Journalism students face the challenge of getting professional experience from newspapers and magazines that of…. Buying the multimedia equipment that would have to be part of anyone’s journalism tool box [...]
December 26, 2008 at 8:44 amI am 26, been out of college for 4 years. For 4 years I have been barely surviving and being told how I can’t be hired because I don’t have an internship. I have stooped as low as trying to be a secretary or a paralegal, but those jobs have BECOME interns. So the low level slowly work your way up jobs have even become free labor.
March 23, 2009 at 1:08 am