Summer Media Internship

I understand and acknowledge two things, and I’ll try not to ramble on too long because I could write pages on this topic.

1)  It is vital that a person, not just a student, gain real life experience before they can be considered as part of the professional work force.

The above argument is made in the article, and for the most part I agree.  In my current job, a trade skill which I’ve worked for eight years now, newbies are called apprentices, not interns, but it’s basically the same thing.  Somebody has to teach you how it works in real life, and if this teaching is so important to the industry and its future, than the people in established companies and the learning institutions need to figure out a way to make it accessible for everyone so inclined without the fear of worker abuse.  Everybody seems to want good talent, but nobody wants to take responsibility for helping develop it.  Everything falls onto the student, and their told to feel grateful for the opportunity.

There are always lumps in system, but the way it is now bothers me.  Students, who already put up with a lot, are basically forced into this internship relationship before they could ever hope of getting a real job, even a low-paying one, and the hiring companies know this and manipulate the steady flow of free labor.

Two things are making this more difficult.  The first is the economy, specifically in the media businesses.  Now that news organizations have no money, they promote the idea of ‘interning’ without pay because they need someone free or cheap to do their leg-work.  Now, however, these grunts are also doing high-end work as well, but still receiving nothing. The second are the over-eager students willing to work for free.  These students reinforce the idea that it is ok for an employer to seek free labor, sometimes good labor, while the other students that may be unwilling or literally unable to do so are unflinchingly left behind.

2)  No work that is used for the benefit of a company or individual, even in theory, should go un-compensated.

It’s crazy to think that a newspaper could have an unpaid intern write stories they are going to publish.  I’m certain that if we look hard enough into court documents and law interpretations from the past, we’d find hard evidence that it’s illegal to do so, not to mention immoral.  If someone is benefitting from your work, you need to be paid, even if it is a little.  I apprenticed in my career, and the person whose shop I helped support with my labor would never dreamed on not paying me.  It’s ridiculous to ask students to put in 20 or so hours working for ‘experience’ in addition to the 40 some they have to work to pay their bills and buy food and the countless hours spent in school and doing school work.  And that’s without having a life.

Apprenticeship is a time-tested tradition, but when greed comes in it’s easy to abuse.  The part that bothers me most is that the student has no virtually no alternative.

I’m currently starting my first internship ever, and generally speaking, unless otherwise mandated by whatever graduate program I’m accepted into, this will be my last.  I did it for the credit and for the clips more than anything else, both things I could have gotten through other means.  After this, I need a job not an internship.

There are some grey areas, though.  The idea of working for school credit is annoying but seemingly acceptable.  After all, nurses and doctors have to complete residencies.  But as is my understanding, they do get paid for them, even though it is minimal compared to what they will be making.  The thing about interning for school credit is that (hypothetically) someone benefits from your work, but you see no compensation and you still have to pay the school for the credits.

After reading that article, my last point is blurred a bit.  These interns are making upwards of $700 a week!  That’s incredible.  That is exactly the way it should be; the system forces us to get the training, but it also ‘carries’ us while we do it.  Additionally, I wouldn’t make that much at my day job if I put in a full 40 hours a week, which I don’t because of school, and at my current job I make a wage higher than I ever have before.

Unpaid internships are counter-productive to the entire school/training system.  It either discourages people from going through the process to get a desired career, or it isolates and denies those people that are unable to make it.  Many students, especially CUNY students, aren’t here because we’re rolling in money.  A lot of us are pulling ourselves out of the poverty line, and a system that forces us to work more for free just helps to hold people down.

New media is also affecting internships, but it’s hard for me to judge how.  I’m curious what everyone else thinks in terms of students blogging for experience on their own or potentially interning at blogs.

As a current interning staff writer at QUEENS LEDGER, I must say that I am a complete believer in some kind of compensation for your hard earned work. Students already have little money as school takes up their time to work, and when internships cost them to come and go to them, as well as report for them, the least they could do is offer a $1oo stipend at the end of the month or every two weeks, whatever it is. They should at least cover MTA/GAS costs and any other cost it takes for us interns to write stories for THEM which sells THEIR papers.

Yes I know, we are gaining once in a lifetime experience by working hands on and whatnot. But still, they would not be there themselves if it did not provide a paycheck right? It’s a matter of ethics…getting paid to work/gain experience? I say yes, but these cheap companies say no.

And then there is the problem that interns can only offer a certain amount of time, which leads the company to believe is to little (10-12 hrs a week) and they frown upon that because unfortunately a lot of companies expect us to be there full-time and best of all unpaid. Where do we draw the line as interning students? Things like that leads to abuse. I would never work more than 15 hrs a week at an unpaid internship. Not only do I have to work in general, but I take classes and I have a LIFE outside of school work and interning.

There are many cases of abuse and I am an advocate against it and I hope that none of the interning students here are working more than 15 hrs a week unpaid. That would just be lunacy and a classic case of abuse.

**NOTE:

Don’t be afraid to tell your interning boss, if it gets to this point, that the work load is beyond the description provided when signing on. They know when they load you up with all the crap that they don’t want to do themselves, and most of the times that stuff are things that a PAID staff member should be completing, not an unpaid intern.  **BE CAREFUL**

There should be a special program that allows students to gain compensation for interning. We’re the future of journalism and the way things are going in this industry, people are turning to different fields because they feel they can’t get the job they spent years studying for. Companies are relying so much on free labor that it’s turning a lot of up-and-coming journalists away. Students should be given this incentive when they intern because the reality for the most part is after you finish an internship now is that you won’t be hired. It’s so bad that companies offer to extend internships or allow students to stay onboard after they finish gaining credit, just to have a bigger staff. And they’ve been surviving so far because they know students are willing to stay to gain more experience and connections.

Working at The Source magazine, I saw what was considered the worst intern experience for incoming college students. They were pretty much being slaved, tackling jobs outside of what they signed on to do, like dropping off hundreds of magazines across town without any compensation to being scolded about how they weren’t writing at a professional level. It was so bad that the company literally burned their bridges, and word of mouth turned a lot college interns off about applying for an internship.

Now the company hires high school interns to do these jobs as part of some afterschool program, and they’re hiring ex-convicts to tackle these tasks—with a majority of the employees unaware of who they are working with. No announcements or memos are given to the staff. Considering underage students are working there now, it’s an unsafe environment for them to work.

Here’s a story that made the NY Daily News about an intern at the time who nearly murdered a woman and her two kids. Click here to read the article.

I’m sure it’s illegal to keep that information from your employees, but the magazine is ran by an entertainment lawyer, so it didn’t surprise me. The same boss just opened a second magazine, Jones Magazine, which has spawned a semi-successful reality show called “Keeping up with the Jones,” and has the same interns doing double the work, which wasn’t what they signed up for. It’s abuse and it’s unfair. Moving forward, I recommend looking at the masthead for both magazines, see who runs the operation, and avoid working for those publications.

Please read the article linked to this and post your thoughts. While it’s a year old and focused on newspapers, I believe it’s broadly true of most media:

American Journalism Review, April/May 2009

Priceless?

Fewer newspapers are offering paid internships to journalism students.

By Will Skowronski

For journalism students, newsroom internships have always provided essential hands-on training. But in a troubled economy, these lessons may come at a cost.

Many news organizations have eliminated paid internships to save money. Others are depending on interns like never before, giving them assignments that once would have gone to more experienced staff reporters. Others, notably the Philadelphia Inquirer, are asking universities to foot the bill in exchange for reserved slots for their students.

“It’s amazing when you look to see how creative newspaper companies are becoming in reducing expenses without cutting their staff,” says Joe Grimm, a visiting editor in residence at Michigan State University who writes about career strategies for Poynter Online. “It’s only natural that they would go after some internship programs, too.”

The Chicago Tribune, which in recent years had several paid interns, will have none this summer. Sheila Solomon, the paper’s senior editor for recruitment, says capable interns still apply even though they know they’ll be working without pay.

The pro bono approach does not affect the quality of applicants, says Solomon, whose paper’s parent company has filed for bankruptcy. “In fact, I’ve been turning students away because they want to be here so badly that they’re willing to come here and try and find a part-time job, or do whatever they think it would take.”

Industrywide, there are more internships available, but fewer of them are paid, says Kristin Gilger, assistant dean at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which does not pay for its students’ internships. Gilger believes students should be compensated for their work. “Philosophically, I would say that newspapers should pay their interns, and pay their interns themselves,” she says. “But good internship experience is so important that we will do what we have to.” In many cases, students complete unpaid internships for academic credit.

The best interns will follow the money, says Penny Bender Fuchs, director of career placement and professional development at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “It’s that old line, ‘You get what you pay for,'” she says. “The most talented students are going to continue to seek the paid positions.”

Grimm thinks dropping paid internships could hurt newspapers. “It discourages people from coming in. It breaks the pipeline, and so when these newspapers are looking for people some place down the road, the people won’t be there,” he says.

The Boston Globe hires 10 summer interns who are paid $700 a week, along with one who is sponsored by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, says Paula Bouknight, assistant managing editor for hiring and development.

The paper’s staff has shrunk in recent years. “The interns have come and, I think, stepped into that breach,” she says. “They’ve always been a group that was tapped to help out. I think with the way newspapers are now, they’re being asked to do more and more. They’re being asked to cover stories that they may not have been asked to cover just a few years ago.”

When that happens, Fuchs says, a paper loses the institutional knowledge of a veteran writer, but gets the tremendous energy of an eager student. “For the intern, it’s an absolute benefit. I think the newspaper realizes that it has a tradeoff there: You know you’re putting someone with less experience on a story that you would’ve normally had a staffer on, but perhaps that intern is going to rise to the occasion and do a great job,” she says.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose parent company also has filed for bankruptcy, asks universities to pay for internships but has final say over who will be hired. “There is nothing more valuable for a potential journalist than a paid summer internship, basically an on-the-job training program. It would be detrimental to journalism schools and news organizations if funding for the programs [were] cut due to financial pressure,” wrote Hai Do, the Inquirer’s director of photography and internship coordinator, in an e-mail. “We hope this partnership will be a model for colleges and news organizations across the country to adopt, if they have not done so already.”

The paper also accepts interns from schools that don’t pay. “We feel strongly that paid internships put all candidates on a level playing field, recognizing that those students from low-income families often cannot afford to work for free and therefore may not be able to take advantage of this opportunity,” he says.

Fuchs and Ernest Sotomayor, assistant dean of career services at Columbia University’s journalism school, say their schools turned down the Inquirer’s proposal. “We think the responsibility for funding these internships should come from sources at the paper,” Sotomayor says. “We have been asked to participate in the past and we have declined and that will remain what our posture will be… We don’t want to be in the position to tell an employer that we’ll be willing to bid for jobs.”

Fuchs says that although she has been approached by other papers, which she declined to name, she doesn’t think paid partnerships will become a trend. “We’re not rolling in dough here, and I can’t imagine there are many programs that are,” Fuchs says.

Jim O’Brien, director of career services at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, says he expects universities � “at least those that have any kind of sense of worth of their program” � will stay away. “It would be a desperation move, I think, on the part of the university. It’s one thing to offer an unpaid internship..as painful as that can be for [students], it can still provide an opportunity for them,” he says. Asking schools to pay for internships sets “an awful precedent. I can’t think of a similarity in other industries outside of the media where this would be done.”

Robert Schmuhl, director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy at Notre Dame, says his program has funded internships at papers including the Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, but the papers make the hiring decisions. “Given the situation in the news business today, colleges and universities should work together with professionals in the field to develop more opportunities for aspiring journalists,” Schmuhl wrote in an e-mail.

Randy Hagihara, the L.A. Times’ senior editor for recruitment, says the paper doesn’t ask universities to fund interns; the Notre Dame student does the internship as part of a sportswriting scholarship. Otherwise, Hagihara hired 12 paid interns for this summer. The number has fluctuated from 10 to 14 in recent years. “For whatever reason, I’ve been able to keep the same pay rate, which is $650 a week,” Hagihara says. “Our philosophy here at the L.A. Times is if you do the work for the paper, you should be adequately compensated.”

And despite the industry’s upheaval, “I think we have an obligation to train the journalists of the future, whatever the future might be,” he says.

Fuchs believes the outlook for paid internships has gotten much worse the last year or two. “I think that unfortunately students are going to sort of accept their fate and work a lot more unpaid internships, at least in traditional news, unless foundations step up and offer,” she says. “I don’t think students ever thought they would get rich off their internships; they simply want to be able to afford to go to another city and work at a big paper.”

Foundation sponsorship is one alternative that works, says Grimm, former recruiting and development editor at the Detroit Free Press. The Kaiser Family Foundation sponsored an intern, selected by the Free Press, to cover urban health care.

Bouknight says the Globe has benefited from internships sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. She sees a potential pitfall for the industry if schools pay for internships.

“In this economic climate, I can understand why people are going that route, and it might even be where we all end up,” she says. “I just think you have to be careful because, of course, it potentially shuts out a lot of people because it shuts out a lot of schools that cannot set aside money. It also means there will be students that you will never see.”

My name is Nadia Singh and this internship course is my last journalism course here at Baruch. I am very excited because after the summer, I would have completed all of my classes, and yes graduate. This summer I am interning at Metrosource magazine will be assisting the editor-in-chief and help put together the content for the magazine, as well as writing and copy editing. My other responsibilities will include forwarding issues to other writers and some clerical work. I am mainly interested in broadcast and TV productions and I do hope that this internship will give me more experience and confidence in my writing. My goal is to perfect my writing and learn how to come up with story pitches.

I’m a creative writing/journalism major and this internship should be the last class I take at Baruch before graduating. (Fingers crossed.)

I’m interning at 2tor, an education company that partners up with universities to create online degree programs. As with many internships, my responsibilities are really, really varied, dictated more so by necessity than anything else. Depending on what’s needed, I can be writing copy for one of our websites, working mindlessly on data entry, mailing stuff out, or fetching growlers from the brewery next door (drinking in the office on Friday is pretty routine).

Although 2tor doesn’t immediately seem like the best place to intern for someone wanting to get into writing and journalism, I feel like, because it is a company based on the Internet and because the future of writing is certainly online, there is a ton I can learn there. I already know the major aspects of blogging from prior experiences, but 2tor fine tunes blogging to science and the minutia of such is still foreign to me. Besides that, I know that 2tor is rapidly expanding start-up, so I’m hoping that my internship there may even evolve into a permanent position.

My name is Lisa Gomez. I am interning on the set of Open, a show on Bronxnet, which is a public access channel in the Bronx. Some of my duties there include working with cameras, audio, graphics, and video editing.

I’ve always had an interest in working in television and after taking TV Journalism Basics here at Baruch, I became more interested in both the behind the scenes and on air realms of television.

I’m very interested in NYC culture and lifestyle and would someday love to host a NYC culture show (something along the lines of Toni On! New York, Cool in Your Code, or That’s So New York).

Hi, I am interning with The Brooklyn Paper as a photojournalist. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I am “on call” pretty much. I am working with two staff writers, and for the editor. When they have a story that needs a photograph they call me and ask that I go get a photo and send it to them. It’s really a lot of fun. And I enjoy the experience I am getting in this field. I hope to get better at taking news style images.

I am also going to Ecuador this summer to study Spanish, and work on organic farms. I am going to learn about indigenous plants and reforestation, and about local agriculture as it relates to local economics. I will be doing a photo essay about my travels. I want to find an interesting story to report on.

I, by mistake, posted my introduction in a comment as like many did. So here it is all over again, short and sweet =]

Daniel Fabiani:

Interning at QUEENS LEDGER and will be writing hard news stories, profiles, entertainment, as well as working with myriad multi-media from text alerts to web design, cameras, etc.

I hope to take away a great set of articles from this internship, as well as some bravery, and of course knowledge of the writing/publishing world.

Already wrote two profile stories based in Queens and Brooklyn that are going to press. And I’ve covered “June in Jackson Heights” a month long arts festival sponsored by City Council member Daniel Dromm (D-New York) to put the town back on the map.

Hello, everyone. My name is Dave Feldman, and this summer, I’m interning at 101.9RXP. For those that don’t know, RXP is a rock and roll radio station that broadcasts out of the West Village. Radio and broadcast media have been very interesting journalism/music mediums to me ever since I joined Baruch’s radio station three years ago (I have since been promoted to the school’s music director).

To be honest, my duties at RXP are far more trivial and are largely based with promotions and getting the station’s name out to everyone in the tri-state area. This includes managing the email list (or “Rock Republic” list), handling contests, talking to contest winners, reviewing emails to different companies who may want to sponsor events, and attending and assembling station events either alone or with a small team of interns.

It may seem basic, but I believe my tasks will help establish myself someday in radio broadcast. As a fan of rock and roll and radio (not to mention as a musician myself), I think that this internship is a good starting point in what I feel would be an exciting career.