Support journalism's future: Pay your interns

My first big break in journalism came in 1981, a week after I graduated high school. Al Post, the editor of the Belvidere Daily Republican, called and asked if I’d like to serve as interim sports editor that summer. I’d covered high-school football for the paper during my senior year and apparently hadn’t libeled anyone.

At the time, I was busing tables part-time at a mall steakhouse for the minimum $3.15 an hour. The newspaper wanted to pay me the princely salary – I’d have a salary! – of $120 a week. Was I interested?

I never set foot in that steakhouse again.

I also quickly discovered that my new salary equated to less than $2 an hour. No matter. That summer, before I’d even started college, journalism became my career.

Would I have worked for free? Probably. At least until my 1973 AMC Hornet conked out. But the meager income helped me pay my frequent car expenses, take my girlfriend to the movies once in a while and generally not have to sponge off my parents before everything had to go toward college expenses.

I kept working for that paper through college, doing vacation relief for editors and reporters during summers, and sports on fall and winter weekends. They paid me, which kept me from having to quit and work more hours at my second job, a retail hellhole called Ardan’s.

Today, I get to work with college journalists who have that same wide-eyed enthusiasm. For years, I’ve been telling them they can make their own breaks and find opportunity. Some do. Others get smacked in the face with financial reality. Plenty of internship opportunities exist … so long as students are willing to work for free.

NIU is a good school – sometimes a great school – but it’s no secret that many students come here because it’s their most affordable college option. They spend their summers working in order to cover a chunk of their college costs. If they’re lucky, their parents can pick up a chunk. The rest goes onto loans that might take more than a decade to repay.

The Northern Star often is recognized as one of the nation’s best college newspapers. Yet, a low percentage of our students work summer internships in other newsrooms. The reason: They can’t afford to. If they don’t make money during the summer, they either won’t return to school in the fall or they’ll have to add to that scary debt load.

I have students who have had to turn down summer internships this year because they not only wouldn’t be paid, they also would have been required to pay for the college credits, whether they needed them or not. Newspapers’ legal reasoning is that the student is purchasing something of value – newsroom experience – which makes up for the lack of pay.

In a very real sense, then, many newspapers are selling journalism experience … not necessarily to students who deserve it, but to those who can afford it. Last time I checked, that’s the kind of thing good newspapers expose … not propagate.

There are better ways. For instance, the Rock Island Argus and Moline Dispatch have paid their interns for years and have no plans to stop.

“We believe that it’s tough to expect good work, response to direction, dependably showing up to work each day, if the person is a volunteer,” said Managing Editor Roger Ruthhart. “We also believe that if you are asking people to work for you, you should pay them. Pretty simple concept.”

At Rock Island / Moline, that’s close to minimum wage. Ruthhart finds it a good summer solution when regular staffers take vacation.

“Our other options would be drops in coverage or paying other staff to work overtime,” he said. “Interns are better than nothing and cheaper than time-and-a-half.”

Publishers and editors: Even in tough times, please set aside something – anything – to pay your interns. Find creative ways to make it happen, in the same way you find creative ways to meet other necessary expenses. Failure to do so is denying opportunity for some talented college journalists. It’s failing to invest in journalism’s future.

As an industry, we can’t afford that.