Are Gimmick Internships Becoming More Common?

Maybe “gimmick” is the wrong word, but it feels like just yesterday we were blogging about the “get paid to drink wine and Tweet” thing, and before that there was the Coral Reef Caretaker thing. Yeah, it’s a real job/internship in the sense that you’re getting real money for ostensibly real work, but the whole thing is set up to be a PR stunt at the same time.

We ask because we just found that Opera, the web browser company, is offering a six-month “Online Writer” internship to one lucky tech writer. Among the perks: flexible start date, a “generous” salary, an apartment for your first month, and free roundtrip airfare to Norway, where Opera is based.

To enter, you’ll have to write an article about “innovations in technology.” The catch: you have to include one innovation featured in Opera and submit it to Opera’s site, publicly, to be voted on by the crowd/groundswell/whatever.

So they get one intern and hundreds of articles about how great their product is.

Anywho, this may appeal to anyone who likes pickled herring and fjords, so we thought we’d post it.

But let’s throw this out there: what happened to the good old PRIVATE internship app?

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting this Thursday, February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.