I remember after my sophomore year of college I began to search the local Philadelphia media market for internships that paid. Inquirer? Nope. Courier-post? Nope again. Philadelphia Magazine? Still Nope. Metro? Yeah right.
To my frustration there was no local internship that paid the bills. Speaking with some journalism students from other areas of the country raised the same point: why aren’t we getting paid?
Now aside from selfish reasons, I do have several reasons interns should be paid:
- Otherwise the only journalists being groomed are ones from rich(er) families
- Those who are truly passionate are forced to: forget the internship (as I did that summer), work 1 job to support the other, or live on credit cards and borrowed money.
- Student Loans + living a summer on credit cards + entering a low paying field = a career change
This is in a field whose exact future is in doubt.  Where many (but not all) newspapers are being accused of being slow to move with the new technology. Why wouldn’t one want some outside influence?
According to the Princeton review the average journalists salary after 10 to 15 years is $69,300.
The cost of paying 4 interns 10 bucks an hour for 10 weeks? $16,000. (4 * 10 * 40 (hrs a week) * 12).
But, It could be worse.
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Philadelphia Business Journal, sucka! Still, we’ll be sure to pay our interns when our media franchise blows up.