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Department of “huh?”
Last year, I got cheesed (it happens) about the widespread publishing practice of not paying interns for time spent doing what anyone paying attention would call “real work”.
The publishing business has yet to take up the cause.
So, I shouldn’t be surprised that the folks at Aol decided that Patch, its beyond-fledgling effort to bolster community journalism, was going to adopt the HuffPo model of not paying contributors.
This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction against HuffPo. There was always an explicit understanding that its contributors were trading compensation for access to a much wider audience.
But Patch… Seriously? It’s a web site wholly dedicated to local journalism. There’s no significant traffic there.
More than that: communities don’t need new forums for building reputations. That’s why they have school board meetings. They need quality reporting.
If Aol is just providing a platform and expecting that I’ll contribute content for free, I think I’d rather build a multi-user blog using open-source and free tools. I may not sell a lot of advertising, but it doesn’t take much to beat getting paid nothing.
Posted by Thad McIlroy, The Future of Publishing
I’d not considered the extent to which employers exploit interns until I stumbled on “Intern Nation,” subtitled “How to Earn Nothing & Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.” It’s written by Ross Perlin, and described by the publisher as “the first no-holds-barred exposé of the exploitative and divisive world of internships.” (http://www.versobooks.com/books/797-intern-nation). I found the book last month in an independent bookstore in San Francisco, and was pleased to stumble on a book that forced me to rethink one of my long-held beliefs.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
If you step back and look at current practices, it’s mind-boggling. Colleges and universities charge students (even require students) to take internships for credit, charge them for the “course”, then offer free labor to publishers under cover of education.
Graduate schools recruit from these same publishers, often getting at least partial tuition from the companies who also get the interns. Nice ecosystem, unless you are an intern.