Are you building your farm team?
By Doug Fisher
It was a typical January day – I'd given my usual opening-class
speech about the importance of working on the college paper and getting
internships, and now there was the student at my door, part puzzled, part
panicked.
"I should get an internship? How? How can I afford it?"
The answer to the first question was an emphatic "yes." But
I'm finding the answers to the second and third ones a little harder each
year.
On my desk, an editor's letter regretfully said a newspaper
was ending its internships. A couple of months earlier,
I'd sat on a panel with this person as we discussed the
industry's push for experience in our graduates and possibly
requiring internships.
But cutting the internships wasn't the editor's decision;
corporate had cut the money, more fallout from the industry's
economic woes. (To the editor's credit, the paper is trying
to find alternative funds.)
A colleague told me a major national internship program
scrambled this year after industry changes undermined some
of its support, and apparently the future still is uncertain.
One friend with a long history recruiting for the newspaper
industry says the word on the street is that many of the
surviving chains are talking about their internship programs'
future, from doing away with them to downgrading them to
unpaid positions. And while I haven't done a content study,
I've noticed what seem like fewer internships listed recently,
and those that are have lines like "seeks unpaid news interns
on an ongoing basis who will be responsible for their own living expenses
and must be able to receive academic credit."
I covered agriculture for many years, and in the heartland,
this is called eating your seed corn.
A new report says the job market is so tight that employers
nationwide are offering competitive positions to those
even without a college degree. At the same time, many newsrooms
are buying out or laying off older employees even as they
try to bring in young talent. But how do you lock up that
talent with relatively unattractive salaries and benefits
if you don't at least hold out the promise of viable internships?
Even if you shift to internships for class credit only,
you're asking someone to pay hundreds of dollars for the
privilege. And don't get all teary-eyed because of the
glorification of the unpaid internship Will Smith's character
struggled through in "The Pursuit of Happyness." The
potential for riches as a stockbroker was much greater than your average
newsroom job being sought by a college student with a near-crushing debt
load.
Broadcasters have had unpaid internships for years, but
they benefit from the lure of the chance to be on camera,
or even near one. Even among broadcast students, however,
I increasingly hear concerns about how to hold down an
internship – and the job they often need
to pay for it.
Those "best and brightest" students we talk about needing to
help revive the news industry know how to do the math. And they know the
importance of internships. The latest University of Georgia nationwide
survey of journalism and mass communications graduates (2005) reported
that more than three-quarters had at least one internship before graduation,
more than twice the percentage of those who worked for the campus newspaper
and far greater than the percentage who worked for a campus broadcast
station. The report is laced with comments from graduates advising those
up and coming to get as many internships as they can.
So if you are thinking of cutting your internships, give
it a second thought. And if you are thinking of going to
unpaid internships, take a hard look at the long-term benefits
over the short-term savings. Maybe there's a middle ground,
like the newsroom internship I saw recently that was for
class credit, but offered a $75 weekly stipend. Over 10
weeks or so, that at least covers the equivalent of paying
for the credit. Even if you are a small paper, isn't that
an investment you can make at least once a year?
"Every team in Major League Baseball has a farm system to nurture young
talent. At BusinessWeek, our farm team is our internship program," Editor-in-Chief
Stephen J. Adler wrote this past summer in praise of its 15 interns.
And every farmer knows that if you eat your seed corn,
you're eventually going to go hungry – or worse.
