It’s Time To Change How We Think About Media Internships

Photo by Shridhar Gupta on Unsplash

I never intended to work in media. That changed, though, when the labor nonprofit I worked for prevented employees from unionizing. Making the move into progressive media didn’t feel like a terribly big jump at the time — maybe there are similarities between the people organizing labor unions and the people covering them with enthusiasm, I thought. I saw an opportunity to turn my rage into activism, and putting my words on the page excited me. Maybe I could even reclaim some of the power I lost to my previous employer by working somewhere I was respected. 

I began looking for work outside of organizing that spring. Because I am both immunocompromised and disabled, the most accessible jobs for me were jobs where I could work from home, and communications and media seemed like a good fit for my skills. Like a growing number of media workers (or would-be media workers), the search for full-time work seemed endless. 

A year and 100 applications later, I couldn’t find full-time work and landed on a part-time internship at a national leftist magazine where I fact-checked and proofread content before it went live. In the beginning, the work was exciting. I worked closely with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, learned extensively about the current political climate, and met like-minded colleagues who made the internship worthwhile.

Over time, the sinister underbelly of the internship began to expose itself.

Interns were pigeonholed based on their identities, and assigned to fact-check pieces that tested mental fortitude.  For example, trans interns were given audio to transcribe where the interviewee was casually transphobic. We were underpaid, our questions ignored, and though many of us went into the internship believing we would have a mentor, that never happened.  

In April, my fellow interns and I asked for $21 an hour, a livable wage in Chicago and just under it for Los Angeles and New York, where many interns past and present reside. After several weeks of emails, including an endorsement from the staff union, we were able to secure part of what we demanded – a $3 raise, from $15 to $18 an hour. We celebrated our accomplishment, and even though the process had been drawn out so long that it meant our internships were nearly over by the time our first increased paycheck was sent out, we were–are–proud to inch future interns closer to a livable wage.

The structure of internships is exploitative for anyone, but especially so if you, like me, are living with a disability — and media internships are no exception. 

Starting in the 1980s, as national publications started overtaking local papers and magazines became increasingly specialized in a media boom, communication internships sharply rose, alongside business internships. In the current media industry, interns are tasked with anything from fact-checking to writing entire uncredited blurbs for publications.

During my internship, interns were tasked with writing entire uncredited pages of front-of-book sections. Through the intern grapevine, I heard similar stories from interns at other publications: without an author’s name attached to a section in a publication, the chance an intern wrote it is high.

M, a former intern at one of Boston’s local NPR stations, wasn’t paid at all during her internship. To make ends meet, she worked a full-time job while also completing her coursework as a student, and commuted to the office via a shuttle bus. Because of these barriers, M says she “wasn’t able to fully commit” and give her all to the work during the internship like some of her peers, who may have had more wealth and didn’t need to work other jobs alongside the internship. 

While internships were once seen as a way to get ahead of the competition, nowadays internships are less rigidly defined due, in part, to the rapidly changing gig economy. In 2023, media interns are no longer mere trainees in the ways apprenticeships were intended — we’ve essentially replaced entry-level jobs, without the promise of something better, or even a full-time position, at the end. “There’s a lot of labor that doesn’t get noticed,” M said, adding that interns “are essentially just underpaid employees.”

To make matters worse, in the US the average paid intern earns $15.41 an hour, though most fall between $12-17 an hour. Contract gigs, and part- or full-time internships often require a wide variety of different skills ranging from fact-checking and editing to previous newsroom experience and a portfolio of published clips, and are compensated based on what an employer determines is the value of those skills accordingly.

Some sources who chose to remain anonymous told Study Hall that they lived in overcrowded housing, burdened by student loan payments, and banking on personal connections for things like monetary loans and free food to make an underpaid – or unpaid – internship financially feasible. Multiple, myself included, racked up credit card debt to make it work.