According to consulting firm J-Intersect, only 5 percent of the quarter-million internships offered in the U.S. each year meet “global benchmark standards.”

Those top internships offer hours of formal training to their interns and spend more per intern. And 60 percent of interns in those programs go on to work at that company.

In contrast, the lower-performing internships only convert 15 percent of interns to hires.

According to the study, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and KPMG (audit/tax services) have the best internships.

The media world, of course, is woefully underrepresented here. It’s a different world. Here, it’s true that going through a shitty internship is kind of a rite of passage for media folk, and you’re pretty much now expected to have one or two unpaid internships under your belt before you can even think about getting paid or trained or whatever. However, as J-Intersect says:

Public relations tricks and uncritical studies can lead to the false advertisement of “prestigious” internships, which in reality consist of interns exploited as cheap or unpaid labor, performing clerical and menial tasks with low prospects for personal development.

So it’s not the most groundbreaking advice, perhaps, but maybe that’s because internships are still one of the best, if not the best, ways to land a job in journalism.

The context: Teenager Richard Brannon asked Anderson Cooper, who is responding to readers’ questions on Twitter as he gears up for his new show, how to get into journalism.

“Anderson, you’ve inspired me to go into reporting. Do you have any advice/tips for a 16 year old who wants to be a reporter/journalist?”

Cooper’s response was that Brannon should intern (“a great way to get your foot in the door, show them how hard you can work, and also let the organization see you, what you’re capable of. It also lets you see all aspects of the news business.”), and know how to write well. “Find your voice as a writer.”

“I wish you a lot of luck, maybe we’ll work together someday. I hope so.”

Anderson, while your advice was not mindblowing, it was pretty accurate (though we’re surprised you didn’t mention social media or the Internet during your 2 minute answer). And the best thing about the questioner being 16 and asking the question now: if he gets his unpaid internships out of the way in high school, maybe he won’t have to bankrupt himself during and after college.

Here’s the whole video.

The information in Mindy McAdams’ post about how would-be journos can still get jobs in journalism is written for, obviously, journalists, but it applies to nearly anyone working in any field of media these days.

She says that three things remain true:

• Many successful journalists do not have a university degree in journalism.
• Many graduates with a university degree in journalism will never have a journalism job.
• Some people who study journalism at university are not well rounded in their knowledge.

There are still journalists out there in younger demographics that didn’t study it. So while the philosophy major who bumbled into a newsroom might sound like a fictitious trope, it’s still possible. ((Mac McClelland, MoJo’s human rights reporter, for one, though we wouldn’t call her bumbling, and we don’t think she studied philosophy.)

More importantly is McAdams’ second and third points: a lot of j-school grads will never work in journalism.
It’s because they studied nothing but journalism (or journalism and English, which according to journo Matt Waite is like “majoring in journalism and minoring in journalism…”) or because they spent so much time studying they didn’t get any work experience.

McAdams writes:

Most journalism jobs are off-limits to all applicants who have not completed at least one internship. No internships = no job. It really is that simple. Many students, it seems, refuse to believe this applies to them. These are usually the students who are obsessed with getting high grades — as if anyone in a newsroom would ever care what grade you got in any class!

We think it’s kinda funny how McAdams, who teaches journalism at the University of Florida, really tries to get students to take internships. Yet “we see a lot of students who: (a) take no internships at all before they graduate; (b) take only one internship; (c) take one or more “low value” internships….all we can do is counsel,” she says. What on earth are you spending $20k a year on if you’re not valuing your professor’s advice?

Freelance marketer Charlie Hoehn graduated in 2008, a terrible time for the job market by any standards.

He says in a TedxCMU talk that he couldn’t find a job; after hundreds of applications the only two companies that had offered him a job were “a staging company whose only job requirements were have a pulse and be a chainsmoker…and the other company was a pyramid scheme.”

So he started working for free.

He says it’s great and has all sorts of advantages: you work “on stuff you actually care about” and there “are no dead ends.” It worked for him, but he put in eight months of working for free before he experienced his turnaround, and only three months before that of “real job searching.”

If you’re interested in how this guy made it work for him here’s his speech.

We wish it was a bit shorter as he’s not the best TED public speaker we’ve seen (not a bad speaker, but for anything with the TED brand on it the bar is pretty high) and he really doesn’t mention how anyone should pay for eight months of free work. But again, it did work for him.

(h/t Lifehacker)

Forbes.com executive producer Coates Bateman sent out a form for invoices to every Forbes blogger, rather than just the “small group of freelancers who are actually paid to write,” reports The Daily.

This message, The Daily says, drew at least 20 replies from writers, who were all collectively learning that some of their colleagues were receiving money for doing essentially the same work.

“Does that mean we are all supposed to be paid for our Forbes blogs?” asked one contributor. (Answer: no.)

flickr: tombothetominator

Most bloggers writing for The Huffington Post believe that they should be paid, but even more say they’ll keep writing for the site regardless of whether they get any cash for their contributions.

Oh, okay then.

The results come from a new survey by the Media Industries Project of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara, which reached out to 60 Huffington Post bloggers to ask them how they felt about Arianna’s payday. Just 26 responded, which is a small sample size, but the bloggers were some of the most prominent on the site, the researchers said.

The results, according to the MIP:

• Ninety-six percent of those surveyed believe that their postings are equal to or more valuable than contributions made by paid editors and curators at HuffPo.
• Sixty-nine percent believe bloggers should share in the $315 million payday.
• A majority (54%) say HuffPo should develop a flat-rate payment schedule for contributors (based on words per post, for example).
• Most respondents (54%) say HuffPo bloggers should press their case through some form of concerted action, such as online organizing or unionization.
• Despite mixed feelings about the merger, the majority (92%) of our sample indicates it will continue writing for HuffPo after the merger.
• Almost half (46%) of our respondents say they will contribute because they benefit from the exposure their work receives at HuffPo, which in turn generates ancillary opportunities, such as book sales or consulting jobs.

This means, the authors conclude dryly: “The relationship between online publishers and content creators is complex and evolving.”

Yes but 92 percent of these people, including many who think they should have been paid, are still going to write for free. What??

So over at A Photo Editor there’s a small note about two photographers who posted job ads for interns one day apart.

The first: “Afghan girl” photographer Steve McCurry (we’d embed an image here, but apparently he’s oldschool enough to actually get paid big bucks whenever anyone uses his photos, and we’d rather not be the one paying). The second: Vincent LaForet, Pulitzer winner and three-time winner at the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

“Oldschooler” McCurry “goes for the craigslist classified ad seeking an intern who is ‘highly motivated’ with a ‘proven track record of excellence.’” The position is full-time and unpaid.

Meanwhile, “New schooler LaForet goes for the blog post (natch) where his legions of followers can quickly spread the word and apply for 3 (yes 3!) open slots on his team. Applicants must be “proficient in Premiere or Final Cut Pro” and “obsessed with gear” and have the ability to “grade footage.”" The positions are paid and part-time.

Very interesting: normally, the blogger would be hiring the unpaid interns, yes?

If you go to the Photo Editor post you can see an application for McCurry’s internship that is absolutely hilarious, but was clearly written by someone who would much rather be getting paid.

Do you need an internship in PR or journalism, but you graduated college–and all the listings you see are for unpaid, college credit positions?

UMass has you covered.

A program once offered to just recent UMass grads that allows them to purchase continuing education credits to satisfy an internship employer is now available to everyone, MediaJobsDaily has learned.

“All of a sudden we were getting calls from students graduating from other colleges,” UMass Amherst career center director Jeff Silver says. “Employers in New York like SiriusXM and Rachael Ray were saying, ‘why can’t [those students] do that program?’”

Essentially, a would-be intern just needs to contact UMass and purchase continuing education credits for $312. Those credits are “worthless to the student but employers love them,” says Silver. A current student at another school that doesn’t offer an internship program or requires prerequisites students don’t have can also partake in a similar program for a bit more money ($200 per credit, and usually 3 credits are required).

Think this is a terrible idea? Silver says it’s no worse than anything he’s seen in the journalism industry over 30 years in UMass’s career center. As ever, “the kids have to get their foot in the door,” he says. “If they just do campus radio and television, and then they try to get jobs…” He says if anything, the quality of internship has gotten better as competition (and the crazy things that people will do to get one, like paying a random school for “college credit” even if you graduated 5 years ago) has stayed the same. “They’re doing the entry level jobs of 10 years ago in a lot of industries. Not just doing the coffee. Staffs have been cut so lean. If they have a capable person they’re not going to say, ‘go get coffee.’”

The interns appear to love the program. Silver recalled a Hofstra student who had landed an internship, then went to discuss the details with his school’s internship director. The school said the student was missing prerequisites and couldn’t do an internship—despite the student having already gotten it.

He came to Silver and purchased three credits from UMass. Did he care whether those credits would transfer back to his home school? No. “I saw him a few weeks ago and asked, ‘have you transferred the credits?’ He said, ‘I don’t even care. I want a job.’” The student then went back for a second semester at the same employer…which of course, still hasn’t had to pay a thing for this student’s work.

Some contributors to the Huffington Post have decided it’s time to stop giving away their work for free. That might sound snort-worthy — yeah, right. Good luck with that. By this point, “content” is so widely devalued in many corners of the Internet that the writers may have little chance of squeezing any change out of the Post.

But writer Michael Walker points to a successful precedent. In The Los Angeles Times, Walker draws a parallel to a comedians’ strike in the ’70s that persuaded Los Angeles’s legendary Comedy Store comedy club to start paying previously unpaid comedians for their performances. Their ranks included now-famous folks such as David Letterman, Robin Williams and Jay Leno.

The catch is that while that was one club and a small group of comedians, the Web is full of writers more than happy to share their work for nothing, or close to it. Walker writes:

The no-pay policy espoused by the Huffington Post is also the Web’s fundamental underlying business philosophy — what the stand-up comedy business might have become had Letterman, Leno and the rest not thrown down the gauntlet. The reality is that the complicity of writers and entire publications in serving up endless freebies to the metaphorical Comedy Stores of the Web has gone a long way toward transmuting “writing” done for pay into into “content,” consumed for free.

It’s nice to think that the HuffPo strikers could have a chance of winning some concessions. But the reality is that this picket line faces an almost innumerable supply of willing scabs.

Photo by MN AFL-CIO.

People working for free is “the new norm,” according to the owner of a startup that has used 50 unpaid interns over the past three years.

“People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they’re going to outperform, they’re going to try to please, they’re going to be creative,” Kelly Fallis, the owner of that startup, Remote Stylist, told Fortune.

Some people work for free to gain experience or a foot in the door. Others do it just to feel useful, like in the case of Cassie Johnson, who lost her job and could only land an assistant manager position at Starbucks. She’s now interning at a PR firm, which she said makes her feel happy and relevant again. “I’m not making any money, so it’s tough, but I feel it’s setting me up for a career.”

But as mentioned on this blog numerous times, you can’t just legally work for free: “A lot of employers don’t get that the law is not about personal responsibility or agreements between consenting adults; it’s about getting the pay to people as the law requires,” John Thompson, a partner at employment law firm Fisher & Phillips in Atlanta, told Fortune.

Fallis’s “interns” commit to a 4-month stint at 30 hours minimum per week. That is because “she has been burned in the past by people who were trying to juggle a paid job with their commitment to Remote Stylist.”

Trying to put food on the table while working for free at another job? The nerve.

flickr: tombothetominator