Growth of unpaid internships probably illegal

I hope no minimum wage paying newspaper has editorialized in favor of a "living wage".

 

Maybe YF doesn't have experience in the media, but I do going back to the 1970s. Newspapers, contrary to what many people might think, are pretty much conservative institutions. That is one of the reasons newspapers are having problems today. Management is generally backwards, having never been tested because they were pretty much guaranteed a profit for a long time. Newspaper management takes a perverse pride in paying people ridiculously low amounts, treats it like it is a proud tradition.

Newspapers managed to pay part-time people before somebody decided this idea of unpaid internships was not only accepted but a necessary part of a career path and a way to covering games. When nursing students have these internships, they are taught procedures as part of a class. With newspapers, there really isn't any required teaching by editors or staff members. They send interns out and expect them to be able to perform well enough to have a story printed in the paper. The other thing is that hospitals where nursing students intern are generally not institutions seeking to make a profit. Newspapers are profit-making institutions.

In addition to being a bad deal for unpaid interns, this is also a potential problem for management. In addition to potential lawsuits about violating minimum wage laws, what about insurance risks? As much as it hurts me to admit YF is right about anything, YF is absolutely right that much of the work is of a clerical nature. Management is saying that they what these intern-writers do is worth zero - it has no value.

 

Those editorials (bemoaning low wages across the state, bemoaning layoffs at other companies in our area) are why I never took management seriously about anything they put on the Op/Ed page.

 

Just as I would hope no newspaper would tell employees they can't put political signs on their front lawn or political bumper stickers on their car while they themselves make endorsements on their pages.

 

I just went back to college last year. Part of the requirement for graduation was to complete an internship lasting at least a minimum of six weeks. It didn't matter if it was paid or unpaid - whatever you could arrange was fine with the school, even if it was doing clerical work in a warehouse or something else that was completely unrelated to the work we had done in our program. Total fucking scam. I was lucky and received an exemption from the internship requirement because of my work history.

Most of my classmates were not so lucky. I was dismayed to find that a major public broadcasting entity was among the biggest offenders for taking people on for a few weeks at a time and giving them jack shit in return. Meanwhile, the same entity has been producing stories exposing how another major Canadian broadcasting giant is exploiting young people through - wait for it - unpaid internships. Fuuuuuuck.

 

So, how does it feel to be a Syracuse grad?

 

We've always paid our interns. Granted, it's on the low end of our scale, but after a week or so of training, the interns perform writing/editing/design/web work as any entry-level staffer would.

 

At my last shop, I set up an internship program and worked with people at local universities/colleges. Most of the interns came from the j-school at the main university in our area, but I kept in touch with the people at the other schools as well. As much as I would have loved to pay interns, my boss was (still is, even worse now) a cheapskate and thus it was an unpaid program.
Each quarter I would send an ad to the different schools to recruit interns. If a student expressed interest, I would meet with him or her and explain our program. If the student was still interested, I would get a copy of his/her schedule and then figure out a time to meet on a regular basis. We would meet on a weekly basis (at least) to go over story(s) ideas for the week ahead. For example, if the intern was covering a meeting, I would go over the agenda and the meeting packet. If there was a particular issue of interest, I would share stories I had done on that topic in the past. If there were particular people worth interviewing, I would pass along the necessary contact information.
The main thing was giving the interns enough information to do the job, then go over the writing to see what worked, what didn't. After the intern wrote a story, I would make corrections and we'd go over both versions of the story, with me explaining each change.
For me, the best part was the moment the interns "got it." Once an intern covered a council meeting. When we met, I showed her the story she wrote. "You buried the lead," I told her. She was confused. I showed her the edited story. This lady was being honored for her years at the police department. When her son was 2, he was scared of McGruff the Crime Dog. Now as an adult, the son WAS McGruff and greeted children alongside his mom. I made that the lead. The intern's face lit up when she saw the edited story.
I ended up having some great interns, plus some that were not too good. The ones that were great I would have LOVED to hire, but again my boss was too cheap to do that (there was money to hire, but he chose to waste it on useless crap). One intern we did take on part-time at minimum wage, but it's hard to live on $170 a week. Fortunately he's full-time elsewhere now.
I know at least three of my interns have since gotten full-time jobs at other papers. I was honored to be a reference for them and gave them glowing recommendations, not just because they were good but because they put the effort in. The interns that were lazy? No way in hell would I give them a glowing recommendation.
It was a lot of work to set up the program and quite a bit of work whenever I got a new intern, but it had to be done. Part of that was because I couldn't cover everything in a town of 60K by myself, but also because I wanted the interns to get a good education and some solid clips. I did an unpaid internship myself in college; my boss ended up hiring me full-time once I graduated from college. In that sense, it's paying it forward. I learned so much more in my internship than I had in the classroom; I wanted my interns to be well versed in as many aspects of journalism as possible (different types of stories, photography, etc.) to make them well rounded.