If you’re a frequent visitor to this site and a friend of Ed, you know that Ed is above all else an advocate for you, the magazine whippersnapper. So when the news broke yesterday that a former intern at Hearst was suing the company, it got him thinking what this means for you. Let’s put aside the obvious debate if she should or shouldn’t have sued (continue that on Ed’s Facebook page if you like). Ed is wondering about the bigger question:
What does this mean for the future of magazine internships? Will unpaid internships disappear entirely if this lawsuit does indeed become a class action suit? Or, heck, even if it doesn’t. Will the threat alone scare companies enough to nix their unpaid internships? With the exception of the increased workload of the industry’s editorial assistants (hello! someone has to do those interns’ duties), this may not be a bad thing. Whoa! You may think, how can Ed consider nixing opportunities for whippersnappers a good thing? After all, it’s Ed’s top piece of career advice: Get an internship, even if it’s unpaid. But hear Ed out:
Because the increase in unpaid interns has ballooned to an unprecedented level in the last ten years (no coincidence that it’s during The Great Advertising Recession), we have way more qualified applicants than there are entry-level jobs. Let’s do a little math. If there are a thousand unpaid interns (and that’s being conservative) at the big NYC magazine companies in one year and there are only about a hundred (and that’s being generous) entry-level openings at those same magazines, that leaves interns with a 10% chance on average of landing one of those jobs. That’s a pretty grim stat. But if unpaid internships were eliminated and what remained were a handful of paid internships, it would even the playing field. Magazine internships wouldn’t be limited to those who only have the means to live in NYC and work for free. They’d be given to a select, qualified few. No longer would college applicants be expected to have several internships on their resume because that would be impossible. One would be good enough, because it’d have to be.
The other obvious benefit is that interns would be paid for the work that you do. And you wouldn’t have to shell out cash (or at least not as much – you still can’t actually live in NYC on an intern’s salary) to get career experience (many unpaid interns have to pay for their credit hours). Still, eliminating unpaid internships would shrink the opportunity for entry into this industry dramatically. Maybe that’s OK. Maybe if students couldn’t get their first internship their sophomore year (because it’d be too competitive), they’d change career paths. And they wouldn’t be one of the hundreds (thousands?) of recent graduates who have four, five, sometimes six internships at big-name magazines but can’t find a job. Ed meets with frustrated graduates all the time who have clearly paid their dues yet can’t land that elusive editorial assistant position – increasingly they are still on the hunt for a year or more. It breaks Ed’s heart that there aren’t enough jobs for them. For you.
So Ed wants to know: What do you think will happen? What should happen? Post on his Facebook page or follow on Twitter with #EdDebate. You can even email him at [email protected]
Love, Ed
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