Summer Media Internship

It would be nice if every single intern was paid at least a stipend to cover transportation, lunch, and other work-related expenses, but in terms of real-life experience (the primary incentive of an internship), isn’t not being paid a valuable lesson in itself?

This is particularly true of newspaper and magazine writers, but the decision to pursue any career with the written word is also simultaneously a decision to suffer a degree of indigence. The fact that less and less interns are getting paid would be an outrage if the entire field of journalism wasn’t also sinking deeper and deeper into the red; the proliferation of unpaid internships is just one symptom of that decline. While the number of full-time journalists are being cut, the challenges faced by interns will remain trivial.

Journalism at large is experiencing excruciating growing pains as it tries to come to terms with evaporating advertising revenues and a public accustomed to free online content. Until the field can find a means of dealing these two issues, there’s little hope that the plight of interns will get any better.