Several years ago I wrote a post here advocating pay for interns. I mentioned how when I used interns, I always paid them, at the very least to cover their lunch and transportation. I remember it caused a falling-out with a colleague in the office who had two interns who wrote and edited for her beauty blog, for which she got paid by advertisers while the interns, who worked there full-time, got nothing except some free product samples.
At the time, many PR agencies, including large ones, used unpaid interns.
That always bothered me. Supposedly, an internship is a chance to learn about a business and gain hands-on experience. But from what I saw, many interns learned little more than how to stuff envelopes or do mundane filing and word-processing. They got little, if any, real instruction about strategy of PR work or how to improve their writing skills.
When I had interns, I took the time to discuss a project, put it into a broader context and explained the hows and whys of what PR people do. When I gave them back edited news releases, I sat with them and explained why I had made the edits.
I'm happy to see that the free internships are a bit less common these days. A story in today's Wall Street Journal says that 43 percent of internships are unpaid, down from more than 50 percent five years ago.
The story gives examples of young people who turned down unpaid internships and, weeks or months later found internships for which they were paid. It tells how one New York consultancy began paying interns after schools stopped sending candidates for unpaid positions.
It's only fair, I feel. Even though interns are hopefully learning and gaining valuable workplace experience, they are doing work for which the employer is being paid. Some of that income should go to the people doing the work. It gives greater value to what they're doing as they learn.