The Punch defends its use of interns
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The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has been approached by News Ltd’s new venture The Punch, offering multiple internships for its journalism students. The interns ”will be formed into ‘flying squads’ to file quick reports on and responses to the news of the day.” According to The Punch, the program will involve “…12 to 18 competent students; ideally they will be formed into pairs with each pair covering one day of the week. This means they will be doing the equivalent of a two-week internship spread out over a semester.” The Punch has advised that students will file short print stories, photographs and voice grabs. They will also have the opportunity of contributing to blogs on The Punch or even starting their own blogs if they come up with a good proposition. These are unpaid internships but The Punch will cover expenses.” Crikey understands that The Punch will post original content written by a small team of four and an outside team of around 60 regular contributors, along with aggregated content. Back on April 4 Mumbrella reported on the new venture:
The story then ran the following update:
There were rumblings on Twitter yesterday about the offer to students, with one tweeter writing:
The editor of news.com.au David Higgins (@cowspanker) shot back:
But Editor of The Punch David Penberthy told Crikey this morning, that the Mumbrella story “…made it sound like we were employing an army of toddlers to work in the journalistic equivalent of a salt mine”. “What we’re looking for is to have access to students at any given time. It’s going to be like a work experience thing,” said Penberthy. ”Papers such as The Tele and The SMH are constantly being approached by students, particularly by UTS. “We’ve spoken to UTS about whether they could… ask a small group of students if they are interested in making themselves available to do occasional pieces for our site. “For example, it could be a vox pop on the day of the Dunlop Pacific sackings. We would ask them to provide 10 punchy little vox pops … bylined by them … they can add that to their cutting file.” As to whether the byline will highlight the fact that the story was produced by an intern, Penberthy replied, “I don’t know if it makes a hell of a lot of difference. At the moment there’s plenty of other newspapers stories being produced at papers by second year journalism or second year law students.” Penberthy doesn’t believe that news outlets relying on interns for content is a new trend either. “No, I think it’s an old fashioned thing. I know heaps of people who got their start doing volunteer shifts. This is no different to work experience at The Age, The Adelaide Advertiser, or The Cairns Post…” A magazine editor in the UK recently told at a Women in Journalism conference that journalists may now be expected to complete up to two years of unpaid work before landing a job, according to Journalism.co.uk. And a story this month in American Journalism Review reported: “…many news organizations have eliminated paid internships to save money. Others are depending on interns like never before, giving them assignments that once would have gone to more experienced staff reporters. Others, notably the Philadelphia Inquirer, are asking universities to foot the bill in exchange for reserved slots for their students.” As for payment for students, “… we’re not paying politicians, or people who have their own blogs that they’re monetising — we’ll be driving traffic back to them instead,” says Penberthy. “This is a long standing non-sinister practice. The model isn’t ‘let’s just get a whole bunch of kids to provide our content.’ It’s all done with the support and the authorisation of the university. There’s been a formal approach to them,” says Penberthy. “Essentially it is work experience, which is about as exciting as any other work experience program that any news outlet runs. We get inundated with requests and we just thought this could be a good way of making it meaningful for them. I get five to ten requests a week and it’s just a way of making it more streamlined…” Penberthy also told Crikey that the arrangement with UTS, and possibly UWS “… won’t exclude other interns.” Crikey approached UTS and Christopher Warren from the MEAA but they did not get back to us before deadline. UTS will respond in tomorrow’s Crikey. CRIKEY: Crikey is involved with internship programs from UTS, The University of Melbourne and RMIT, among others. We also take interns who approach us independently. |
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12 Comments
Dear Crikkey,
Far be it from me to claim a life free of typos.
But I am pretty sure I didn’t tell your reporter (by telephone) that the punch was seeking interns who are “interested in making themsleves abailabel to do occ pieces for out site” as your afternoon email states.
Perhaps you could ingest in a prof-reader or at the very leats publish an erection.
Yours, and fully sic,
David Penberthy, editor, thepunch.com.au
PS short version of this yarn: “Website runs small work experience program similar to Crikey’s”
Have amended, thank you David. Good luck in your new venture, may it be forever free of typos.
Thank you Sophie. I’ll resist the temptation to promise that it will be!
Dear Penbo,
Please feel free to syndicate my non-topical, grammatically incorrect, inwardly looking content from http://davefromalbury.wordpress.com* in The Punch whenever you like.
Yours faithfully
Dave from Albury
*No interns were harmed in the production of this blog.
A few things:
The publisher of the local freebie City Hub which often has punch and is sometimes quite punchy has been accepting/soliciting UTS journalism student work unpaid since I would guess 1995? But then it is essentially non profit though it sells advertising. Declaration - I slogged the distribution run 2002 to 2007.
Secondly I wanted to respond Chris Warren’s previous devout/pious piece about Press Freedom Day and the high moral ground again mentioned here. Quite right but here’s the thing Chris - when I was virtually arrested (wrongfully) on Sydney Uni Campus for covering a student education protest pre Howard election loss, as a community media blogger (not a ‘journalist’) the MEAA were conspicuously silent. A senior ABC journo was supportive and specifically mentioned “press freedom” as a concern. The NSW Ombudsman did help reverse the 12 month long ban from the campus. Totally outrageous abuse of power it was too.
Which all leads me to think we are in quite grey and uncertain moral times when it comes to practice of blogger new media which doesn’t slot in as “journalism”. Ironic that I write this as Media Watch Retro is being broadcast.
In Feb just gone I pulled 34,000 readers that month (now on the slide as a I relocate and set up on a rural block). Possibly due to a headline about Chinese duchessing of the Australian Govt as allegations of Yellow Peril xenophobia were ramped up. The point is my community media shuns sensationalist rubbish as much as possible and has been growing and the new content makers as staff fodder in the sector are heading into a world of new media practice but lacking institutional support from the MEAA to the big corporations.
For instance what does RTK have to say about brave bloggers in Fiji? Or the community media radio station that gazumped the ABC over the Vic fire warning etc as confessed on 4 corners. At this rate the new community media will need to build their own lobby?
A few things:
The publisher of the local freebie City Hub which often has punch and is sometimes quite punchy has been accepting/soliciting UTS journalism student work unpaid since I would guess 1995? But then it is essentially non profit though it sells advertising. Declaration - I slogged the distribution run 2002 to 2007.
Secondly I wanted to respond Chris Warren’s previous devout/pious piece about Press Freedom Day and the high moral ground again applied here. Quite right but here’s the thing Chris - when I was virtually arrested (wrongfully) on Sydney Uni Campus for covering a student education protest pre Howard election loss, as a community media blogger (not a ‘journalist’) the MEAA were conspicuously silent. A senior ABC journo, like top shelf, gave me a message that was supportive and specifically mentioned “press freedom” as a concern. The NSW Ombudsman did help reverse the 12 month long ban from the campus. Totally outrageous abuse of power it was too.
Which all leads me to think we are in quite grey and uncertain moral times when it comes to practice of blogger new media which doesn’t slot in as “journalism”. Ironic that I write this as Media Watch Retro is being broadcast.
In Feb just gone I pulled 34,000 readers that month (now on the slide as a I relocate and set up on a rural block). Possibly due to a headline about Chinese duchessing of the Australian Govt as allegations of Yellow Peril xenophobia were ramped up. The point is my community media shuns sensationalist rubbish as much as possible and has been growing and the new content makers as staff fodder in the sector are heading into a world of new media practice but lacking institutional support … from the MEAA to the big corporations.
For instance what does RTK, as valid as it is, have to say about brave bloggers in Fiji? Or the community media radio station that gazumped the ABC over the Vic fire warning etc as confessed on 4 corners. At this rate the new community media will need to build their own lobby?
oops, thought that was an edit window like Sydney Indy Media used to do, funny to think that ‘Kindy Media’ as Bolt has called it pioneered such friendly interaction. Instead I duplicated cie la vie.
Good new website layout. Keep going.
Please don’t take offense at this Tom, but are you a member of the MEAA? It is a union after all. While they are charged with defending rights of those in the media in general, I think you have to be a member to really expect them to champion your specific, personal cause.
If you are a member, then I absolutely agree - the union should have your back.
Professor Wendy Bacon, Head, Journalism, Information and Media Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology, Sydney responds:
UTS has a large internship program which includes the ABC, AAP, Fairfax publications both print and online, News publications both print and online; Eureka Report, Crikey, ACP magazines, Pacific magazines, Channels SBS, Ten, Nine and Seven; radio stations all over Sydney and many other media organisations small and large.
Internships are highly valued by our students who learn ‘on the job’ from experienced journalists. Most internships are unpaid, but a few which involve regular shifts are paid. We have had a proposal from David Penberthy this week and have written back to him explaining that we can only consider the internship arrangement after the publication has been in operation for some time. The question of unpaid work experience in the current environment in which the media are seeking new business models is an important one for journalism education. We are raising it with colleagues at other universities so that we can develop a consistent approach which would include appropriate supervision of each intern by experienced journalists.
I can see this both ways. When I was a journalism student I happily did unpaid work for a number of media outlets as I wanted to build up a creditable portfolio. The thing was that these internships were short and sporadic - two weeks here, one week there.
Having seen my work a small independent community newspaper then offered me a summer internship - a paid summer internship. I’m not saying the pay was great but it was crucial recognition that my work had real value. Would I have driven halfway across Melbourne every day for three months if I was not being paid? The days when I had stayed up too late the night before and didn’t really feel like getting out of bed? The first time maybe. The second or third or tenth time? Probably not.
I was the only intern and there were plenty of experienced journalists willing and able to help me learn the trade and explain the nuances of our audience. It was a fantastic learning experience. But what if I was one of a dozen interns all competing for the attention and support of a couple of experienced journos? Would I have learnt so much or would I have made a major error, alienated myself from our readership, irretrievably offended a crucial contact, lost all my confidence and decided to give up journalism as a potential career?
At the end of the day, a professional organisation can not rely on inexperienced volunteers, no matter how enthusiastic they are. At the end of the day very few people - particularly young people - will continue to give up their time on a long-term and reliable basis if they are not getting paid. Why should they go into work instead of the beach? What’s in it for them? Particularly if they are working for a profit-driven enterprise.
Internships are a two-way exchange for both the employer and employee. The intern gains crucial work experience in all the nuances of the trade that can’t be taught in a classroom. The employer gets the opportunity to check out potential future employees, see if they fit into the organisation and provide an example of their own worth ethics and way of doing things before the interns pick up bad habits from somewhere else. Many interns, particularly journalism students, are also capable of producing valuable work at relatively low-cost to the organisation. It’s also a way of “giving back” to the profession and passing on one’s expertise rather than just take take taking all the time.
Extended unpaid internships also cut off the profession from talented students who do not have the independent means or family support to work for months without an income. Do we really want journalism to be the bastion of the children of the rich and influential with no chance for a Catherine Deveny or Jim Schembri from the unfashionable side of Melbourne to rise to the top?
I haven’t slept in weeks.
The points raised by Margret above are all valid. I’m studying in Germany, and unpaid internships are the norm here, and the run-on effects here are pretty bad. Here’s a few:
1)How much would you be willing to pay a student fresh out of their degree, when someone who knows slightly less, and will be not nearly as committed is willing to do it for free? Not much (About 800 euro a month in fields related to Art). Free internships depress wages for students post-graduation.
2)Uh oh. There’s a financial crisis and we need to cut jobs. What shall we do? Fire the less experienced staff and replace them with interns. Sure interns aren’t as good, but they’re free, we could hire 4 or them! Yippee. This is particularly a problem in Germany, where very few people are actually employed (which here still means a job for life, or at least until the firms pension payroll swells so much they go broke) but are instead hired on short term contracts, or employed selbststaendig. Unpaid internships decrease job security post graduation.
3)What about those internships post-graduation? The student, is no longer a studying, so is no longer covered by student health insurance; they’re not employed, so insurance is not provided by their employer. Who gets sick anyway? Health insurance is a luxury item. Right. Right? Internships open up health insurance gaps.
So if its so crap why would students do it? Tragedy of the Commons - unfortunately “working” for free is a common good, every individual experiences the marginal benefit of having that reference letter, while all students are burdened with the problems listed above. I am 100% against the idea, but, I’ve got to do it since everyone does (otherwise I face all the problems wthout the benefit of having a damned reference letter). I haven’t studied for 5 years so I can work for free for two, like some of my friends here have. I should have become a plumber.