As Newspaper Budgets Shrink, It’s Interns Versus Staffers

Battle Royale! Shrinking newspaper budgets don’t always mean good news for interns, as cheap labor has to be weighed against the morale hits a newsroom will take if it appears staffers are being replaced by interns.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is among the papers that cut intern programs or eliminated them entirely, Editor & Publisher reports. And the paper had already extended offers to interns before it cut the program, leaving some j-students scrambling at the last minute. Uncool.

The Cincinnati Enquirer hasn’t taken a single intern in five years. The Topeka Capitol-Journal still takes on five interns or so a year, but 2009 was the third summer that the interns worked for free.

On the other hand, hey, interns are free labor, and some papers seem to be espousing the we’d-be-crazy-if-we-passed-THAT-up attitude.

“Everyone is short-staffed,” Carl Lewis, a journalism and Southern Studies major and former intern, told E&P, “so they’re looking for as many people as they can to work part time, and without benefits.”

Too, interns are doing far less grunt work these days. Which can only add to the perception that low-or-no-paid college students are replacing oldtimers…

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