Adelle Waldman has written for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer, and The New York Sun. The article below was published and posted on The New Republic blog on Wednesday, June 25, 2008: Intern or Die: Why internships in journalism are bad for young people, and bad for the industry. The views expressed in no way reflect those of the Temple University Editing Residency blog nor The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, Inc. Comments are welcome regarding what Ms. Waldman has to say.
Beware the intern you just sent on a coffee run. And not just because
she may use the yellow sweetener instead of the pink. No, beware the
intern because as easy as it is to punk her around now, this
pleasure, like smoking or drinking, is likely to come back to bite
you later, when she rises to a position of power. Which is quite
likely, as one of the fundamental truths about post-millennial
working life is this: Ex-interns run the show. And like many banal
workforce realities, this one’s pernicious.
The field of journalism offers a prime example of the power of the
internship. At policy magazines like TNR, at glossies like Vanity
Fair and Vogue, and at daily newspapers and television news programs,
a couple months of grunt work for no or low pay is virtually a
prerequisite for future employment. An inexperienced recent graduate,
English major though she may be, is not going to waltz into a job in
The New Yorker’s mail room–let alone as an editorial assistant–just
because she’s a longtime fan of the magazine whose term paper on the
avant-garde was one of the most insightful that her English professor
had read in years.
In contrast, the successful applicant to an entry-level magazine job
(a position that often consists of filing expenses and answering
phones for a more senior editor) is likely to have had more than one
internship under her belt. All magazine internships involve clerical
work, but they probably allow for a bit of fact-checking–maybe some
writing and reporting, too. And even the grunt work is (at least
marginally) illuminating. Transcribing interviews, for instance, is
sheer drudgery, but it’s also an intimate view into the reportorial
process. And most internships also provide ample opportunity for the
intern to pick up many unspoken rules of the field: She learns, for
example, what went into the slush pile (the lowly name for stacks of
unsolicited manuscripts), and she sees how successful writers craft
their story pitches and get awarded assignments. Magazine internships
often function as a sort of finishing school for rough-edged college
students; they don’t always create better editors and reporters, but
they certainly teach them the journalistic equivalent of knowing
which is the salad fork. (For more elaboration, check out this Salon
article by a former Harper’s intern.)
Newspapers–once seen as less snooty than magazines–are no less
exacting. There are basically two ways to get a job as a big-city
newspaper reporter. One is to start at a small-town paper–step
one–and from there work your way up to a slightly bigger paper–step
two–and go on to progressively bigger and better papers, so that in
five to ten years, you’re covering school board meetings in a major
metro area, like Denver or Philadelphia. The other common trajectory
is to do a summer internship at a newspaper in a big city and wind up
with a job offer when you graduate, bypassing the preliminary steps
altogether. This is, for example, what disgraced New York Times
reporter Jayson Blair did, and it’s what I did, too: I was offered a
job at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland after I interned there.
On its face, journalism’s reliance upon internship experience seems
to be perfectly reasonable, an essentially merit-based system that
rewards young people who’ve put in time above and beyond what their
schooling required. But it’s not that simple.
For one, most journalism internships discriminate on the basis of
financial wherewithal. Rare is the internship that doles out more
than minimum wage, and who can afford to spend a summer working 40
hours a week for peanuts? Probably not a college student with a
typical financial aid package. (At Swarthmore College, for example,
the average student with financial aid was expected to contribute
$1,890 over the summer, according to a recent article in the student
newspaper.) On top of that, college students not lucky enough to be
from internship meccas like New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Boston, or Chicago are at an even greater
disadvantage–unless their parents can help them out with the money
to live for the summer in one of these places. Of course it’s
possible for a really determined young intern without means to work a
job on the side–waiting tables or the like–to pay her way, but
that’s not the norm because … well, you try living in a city like
New York or D.C. on a few hundred dollars a week. The rule of thumb,
when it comes to internships, is that only the well-heeled bother to
apply. (Newspapers may be a bit exceptional in this regard, as
historically they have paid more.)
The other big problem with the internship culture is that it rewards
young people who know exactly what they want to do and immediately
begin strategizing about how to get there. Why? “The best internships
get hundreds of applicants for just a few positions,” says Joe Grimm,
the recruitment and development editor for the Detroit Free Press and
a recruiter for Gannett. Successful applicants are likely to have
worked on the school newspaper or magazine, first in high school and
then in college. In other words, they started laying the groundwork
for their careers in journalism before the braces came off their
teeth. Selecting for such single-mindedness might make sense when
seeking out, say, tomorrow’s astronauts or professional athletes. But
is it sensible to, by default, select for those qualities in
journalism, a field that requires its practitioners to observe and
comment upon the world at large? Wouldn’t it make sense to do the
exact opposite? That is, create incentives for people who have wider
experience in the world?
There’s a social good problem at play when news is delivered by
people who harbor such similar ambitions and come from such similar
backgrounds, people who have spent their summers in the same cities
and have worked at the same types of organizations. Naturally, they
are likely to keep spotting and writing about the same types of
issues–and keep missing different ones. What would it be like to
have more education reporters who’d spent time teaching in struggling
public schools or metro reporters who’d been cops or social workers?
But while it’s not impossible to break into journalism at an advanced
age (such as 24 or 25) with little but intelligence and drive and
non-journalistic life experience to recommend you, the chips are
certainly stacked against you.
Take the case of Bethany McLean. McLean is the Fortune magazine
(soon-to-be Vanity Fair) reporter who questioned Enron’s viability
more than six months before the company’s implosion. “[T]he company
remains largely impenetrable to outsiders,” McLean wrote in March of
2001. “How exactly does Enron make its money? Details are hard to
come by … the numbers that Enron does present are often extremely
complicated.” It’s probably not a coincidence that she did such a
thorough job of breaking the company’s financial information down
since McLean, unlike many business reporters, had spent three years
reading similar reports as an analyst for Goldman Sachs before
deciding to segue into journalism. But if it weren’t for a personal
connection–the guy she was dating had an acquaintance at
Fortune,–she never would have applied. She was hired as a
fact-checker and gradually moved up the ranks–McLean probably would
never have had the opportunity to write the story. She’d spent months
applying to newspapers for business reporting jobs and hadn’t landed
a job. Most likely because her r?sum?, filled with business
experience, did not look like that of the typical applicant. And that
was 13 years ago. “It’s probably even harder to break in now,” McLean says.
Of course, there are institutions that are ready to profit off your
predicament–er, I mean, help you get your foot in the door–if
you’re a late-comer. Shell out more than $40,000 to attend, say,
Columbia University School of Journalism (again, like I did), and you
can apply for the same internships as college students. In fact, you
are strongly advised to do so. It’s rather a lot of trouble–and a
pretty penny–just to get an internship and by extension an
entry-level job, especially in a profession where the average
starting salary is about $32,000, but that’s the nature of journalism
today.
Of course, none of this is the interns’ fault. It’s easy to disparage
them for being strivers; the implication is that other young people,
who are truly intellectually curious, are out there grooming dogs and
smuggling immigrants, Augie March-style. But that’s not fair. When we
set up a system that rewards young people so disproportionately for
behaving like strivers from the age of 14 on (or whenever they grasp
the highly fraught imperative to get into college), it’s
mean-spirited to then find fault with them for doing so. It’s
probably safe to assume that many of this summer’s interns would
rather not be photocopying expense reports. But the ones who opt
out–the ones who work minimum wage jobs and learn firsthand
something about how the other half lives, something more than what
they learn just from reading How the Other Half Lives in American
History class–well, check back in a few years. They probably won’t
be working at a liberal magazine that covers poverty policy. That job
went to someone who’d done an internship.
Temple University Editing Residency 