Paying to Work?

Last week Atlantic Media decided to start paying interns , including retroactively paying last year’s interns. This is huge news for journalism interns. For college students (and graduates!) who want to get experience at a publication (and often more than one internship is necessary if you ever ever want to get hired anywhere) unpaid internships are de rigueur. And these aren’t coffee-fetching internships (do those even exist anymore?) These are (as many articles have been pointing out lately) what would otherwise be paid staff or freelance jobs. In fact, the students filling these unpaid positions are often in fact paying for the privilege since they complete the internship for college credit which even though the college isn’t providing the education or experience, they still must pay tuition for.

During my time at Popular Photography I was in charge of hiring and supervising (and assigning work to) several interns, all (but one who shall remain nameless, but she should know who she is) of these interns were incredibly smart and hard working, and I did my best to give them meaningful work that they could not only learn from but leaving with something valuable to put on their resumes and clips to show. They all interned for college credit and worked part-time around paying job schedules. But we never gave them a dime, and the work that they did was things that we didn’t have the budget to pay staff or freelancers for.

When I was in college I was an unpaid intern at Metro Times Detroit (and paid for the college credit to do it), I was there part time around two other part time paying jobs, but the experience remains one of my fondest journalistic memories (it was thrilling to feel like a real reporter and be sent out on assignment and pitch ideas, and work alongside and learn from some of the savviest journalists I’ve ever met). I did a lot of small work there for which I wasn’t paid, but when I pitched and wrote two feature stories I was paid (an albeit very small) freelance rate, and walked out with solid clips and experience. I have no doubt that internship helped me as I started my career.

While few publications (like Atlantic media and Mother Jones) offer paid internships, the competiveness of the publishing world (especially now when experienced journalists are working beneath their skill level) shows no sign of letting up, while paying positions (and entire publications) are becoming less available. So paying interns should be common practice, but unless it becomes illegal to hire people and not pay them (it should!) I doubt many if any publications will follow Atlantic’s lead. If fact some of the woman’s glossies seem to be going the opposite direction—auctioning off the privilege of working there; there is currently a $12,000 bid to work next to Anna Wintour at Vogue for a week. While that example may be solely for the morbid curiosity of working with the Devil Wears Prada, internships at magazines like Elle have also been auctioned off.

It’s a Catch 22 as a college student or recent grad; you don’t have the experience to get hired, and the only way you can get the experience is to work for free. While publications can’t (or won’t pay interns like they would real employees—and maybe that shouldn’t since there is often a lot of work teaching on the staff’s part—they could at least provide freelance pay for the work they publish.