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So I got an internship at my local newspaper, should I do it?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by kweonsam, Feb 12, 2015.

  1. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    My first gig at 16 was paid, but any of us who cared put in more hours beyond the 24 hours we were approved for by the small daily. This was fine, and we knew we wouldn't be needed after the school year ended because there would be no high school sports to cover. I had a restaurant job lined up for the summer because I needed the money for college. After high school graduation, a very small weekly competitor offered me a full-time job covering news for less than the minimum wage. It was hard to say no, but I did in fact need to make a certain amount of money and at the restaurant I would make twice as much as at the weekly.

    The real complaint with unpaid internships is that it gives an advantage to kids who don't need the money over kids who do. This is especially true on prestigious magazines, where it can hinder diversity.

    Nevertheless, if you don't need the money, I'd recommend doing it if the boss seems reasonably sharp. You could learn a lot. Before I took a college class I was a decent professional writer, and not all of it was my doing. Nearly 40 years later, the SE now works for one of the NFL teams' websites, and a couple of my fellow part-timers and I were reminiscing on Facebook recently. Their competence as teen-agers -- one was my age and the other a couple years older than us -- pushed me to keep up with them. The result was a lot of opportunities and a full-time job covering preps midway through my sophomore year of college, at a daily with a bit more than 100,000 circulation, albeit for really shitty pay.
     
  2. I Should Coco

    I Should Coco Well-Known Member

    The shitty pay sure hasn't changed. I don't usually complain about my stagnant salary, but a graph in today's fivethirtyeight.com story jumped out at me a bit:

    Most journos I know and have worked with over the past 21 years haven't sniffed the $40,000 salary plateau, and we probably never will.

    Here's the entire article, about how the recession hurt millennials more than others:

    Bad News For The Class Of 2008 | FiveThirtyEight
     
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