Journalism’s unpaid internship complex

I thought this piece by Darren Walker hit the nail on the head:

Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And while many Americans believe fervently and faithfully in expanding opportunity, America’s internship-industrial complex does just the opposite.

As the summer internship season gets into full swing, consider, for instance, how a plum internship may alter a young person’s career trajectory. While some students take a summer job in food service to pay the bills, others can afford to accept unpaid jobs at high-profile organizations, setting them on a more lucrative path.

This topic has been explored before, but I think it’s worth revisiting — especially for people who work in journalism/media who got where they are by dint of unpaid internships or jobs at college newspapers.

I’ve always been proud of the fact that I never took an unpaid journalism internship. But after reading Darren’s piece, I realized that my entire journalism career is built on unpaid labor nonetheless. My experience is probably on par with a lot of other journalists.

Having journalists who come from a variety of backgrounds isn’t just important for egalitarian reasons. It’s crucial that we employ reporters, editors and other media-makers from across a spectrum of human existence to fulfill the core promise that journalism has failed to keep in recent years.

The internet has led to a more diverse media buffet, but the capital-J Journalism outfits have on the whole kept appealing to an increasingly white, educated, wealthy readership. It’s a vicious cycle: we cater our content to the people keeping the lights on in our newsrooms, and because they constitute our primary audience, we fail to lure in new readers.

The readership problem is also a problem of public service: Someone who grew up on food stamps has a more immediate (and I would argue, more important) perspective on life within the welfare state than someone who entered journalism with a more privileged background. Maybe more importantly, someone who grew up on food stamps (or in an immigrant family, or part of another marginalized community) cares about the subject in a way that more privileged reporters do not. Of course, there are beat reporters who passionately cover subjects they don’t have personal experience with. That’s great! But I would argue that it’s easier to derive passion from personal experience than sheer intellectual curiosity.

Anyway, I wrote some tweets about this subject to try to better understand why journalism’s internship economy is so insidious.

If you’re a journalist, I encourage you to share your own career trajectory here. How did you get your start in journalism? Did you take any unpaid internships? If so, did your parents support you, or did you work other jobs? If we study the thorny path to a job in journalism, maybe we can help aspiring younger journalists traverse it.