whistlesays asks: Ernie! I have so much to say! First - LOVE what you do on Short Form Blog. I get a lot of news from your blog alone sometimes. Second - I had no idea you're MSU alum and TBG alum! I just finished up as Editor in Chief this past year. Thanks for making that website in 2004! Third - love your piece on Medium. Finding paid work is such a huge issue that I'm right in the middle of. Just graduated, moving w/out a job, terrified. But I still have hope! Thanks for bringing up this subject - so needed.
Hey there! Great to hear from you. You know, here’s the thing that was great about The Big Green. When it launched, it was built essentially as a way to give folks who couldn’t get on at the SNews a chance to build bylines. And it worked! We built a pretty good foundation for it—Beth Desy had the foresight to launch it, but Sarah Hunko really laid the foundation to make it thrive and I helped on the design front.
The reason I wrote what I did is that I know it was a scary time for me as a student to not be sure if I’d be able to turn what I did into a career. But fortunately I was able. The best advice I can give is creativity, tenacity, and a willingness to stick your neck out there. SFB started as an effort to push my creative efforts out there, and it worked! For folks looking for a job, something like SFB is what I’d recommend. Not necessarily as a replacement for a job, but as a way to show that you’re a self-starter and can build (and more importantly, finish) things.
Thanks for the kind words about SFB and the Medium piece. It was nice to look back on those days even if they weren’t easy. Please let me know how things are going, and thanks for letting me know TBG was left in good hands!
Take it easy! :) —Ernie @ SFB
EDIT: I meant this to be a private response, but screw it, the advice is good. :)
![What you should know about the Black Swan unpaid intern case
The ballerinas weren’t the only tortured souls on the set of Black Swan. Some of the unpaid interns on the set found themselves doing the kind of menial labor (i.e. grabbing coffee) that they didn’t go to school for. And on Wednesday, a court agreed, ruling that 1) the interns should have been paid for their time and 2) opened up the company behind the film, Fox Entertainment Group, up for a class-action lawsuit. “Judge [William H.] Pauley’s ruling might still symbolize the tipping point in the battle over unpaid internships. Unless a higher court steps in, some judges might choose to follow his lead in the future,” The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann writes, noting that the case could scare some companies off from using unpaid interns for liability reasons. (Side note: We’ve been following the unpaid internship issue lately, and I wrote a Medium post about the topic you should read.)
(thanks Sara Schwartz)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3742d8d55a6be18fa582499b3a5bf366/tumblr_mod1qpf2Cq1qas8z9o1_500.jpg)
The ballerinas weren’t the only tortured souls on the set of Black Swan. Some of the unpaid interns on the set found themselves doing the kind of menial labor (i.e. grabbing coffee) that they didn’t go to school for. And on Wednesday, a court agreed, ruling that 1) the interns should have been paid for their time and 2) opened up the company behind the film, Fox Entertainment Group, up for a class-action lawsuit. “Judge [William H.] Pauley’s ruling might still symbolize the tipping point in the battle over unpaid internships. Unless a higher court steps in, some judges might choose to follow his lead in the future,” The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann writes, noting that the case could scare some companies off from using unpaid interns for liability reasons. (Side note: We’ve been following the unpaid internship issue lately, and I wrote a Medium post about the topic you should read.)
(thanks Sara Schwartz)
I won’t sugar-coat it. That my foot crossed the threshold into the crease of the door is pretty amazing, and I’m still, nine years later, sort of amazed it happened.
Following up on the ProPublica Kickstarter regarding unpaid internships I pointed out last night, I wrote a post on Medium about how a paid job post-graduation was a major lifeline career-wise—and if that job was an unpaid internship instead, how it might not have actually happened. — Ernie @ SFB
A Crowdfunded Investigation of Internships
Late last month, ProPublica launched a Kickstarter to cover the costs of hiring an intern to help with our internships investigation. Our intern will create a microsite on the intern economy, traveling around the country to collect interns’ stories that will supplement and enhance our more traditional watchdog reports. But to do this, we need to raise $22,000 by June 27.
Our editor-in-chief Steve Engelberg sat down with ProPublica’s community editor Blair Hickman and news application fellow Jeremy Merrill to talk about our unique approach to investigating the intern economy.
“Beyond the Kickstarter, from a reporting perspective and project perspective, what’s particularly noteworthy about this is we’re starting with community and we are starting with data and news applications,” said Hickman about the project. “We’ve said from the get-go, we are investigating internships and we’re doing this in a very open way — which is a little bit different than our normal investigations. And because of that, we’ve gotten a ton of tips flooding in and we’re starting to do news reports off of that. But it’s starting with the crowd.”
FJP: This will be fantastic. Here’s a link to the Kickstarter, and here’s a podcast about the project. Reminds us of Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation, which is a fairly interesting read.
Thank you for Tumbling!!
You want to solve the intern problem? Consider donating to this pretty darn awesome idea for an investigation.
A job posting at the prestigious foreign policy magazine for an editorial assistants job.
They want you to write, pitch, fact-check and research, five days a week, for at least 35 hours a week. A full-time job, in other words.
How much are they willing to pay? Nothing at all. They want your labor, for free. And what do they offer in return? Experience. That’s it.
If you’re wondering why it’s hard to find people from low-income backgrounds in elite journalism—which, disproportionately, means people of color—look no further than this. The only people who can afford to work full-time for free come from wealth, and generally, if you’re wealthy in America, you’re white.
It’s a barrier to entry that keeps the field closed to everyone but our affluent, (almost certainly) Ivy-educated elites. That’s a problem.
Important comment above. (Also relevant.)
According to MSNBC’s Ned Resnikoff, systematic usage of paid internships disproportionately shuts out working-class and lower-middle-class writers from journalism careers. Do you agree?
This is a definite issue for young journalists — though not across the board. Many newspapers, for example, offer paid internships, and when I started in the industry, I was lucky enough to get a temporary job that was paid. (Magazines, traditionally, are less likely to offer paid internships.) So I definitely feel for journalists struggling to make a career out of this. Good on The Ed Show for raising the issue, though the next question is, what are NBC’s own practices on the matter? — Ernie @ SFB
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