It’s come to my attention that I’m a minority in my profession.
I’m a first-generation college graduate in my immediate family, and less than half of my extended family have a college degree. That surprises a lot of people when I tell them, and I’m finding that almost none of my peers journalism have a similar background.
This is just a hunch, but I think the lack of socioeconomic representation comes from the culture of unpaid internships among media outlets. There’s a new investigative book on unpaid internships from a guy named Ross Perlin called “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.” In it, Perlin attacks the “glamour industries” for the misuse of unpaid help—film, fashion, entertainment, politics and the media—and the cost of breaking into those industries.
This isn’t an attack on my wealthier peers. They have as much of a right to be at a news desk as much as anyone. But if media companies didn’t have an unpaid internship culture, would our newsrooms be more diverse? I would give you numbers to prove my hunch, but I’m having trouble finding them (if you come across any, e-mail me at mcnally.ali@gmail.com) The latest annual newsroom census from the American Society of News Editors detailed minority numbers in newsrooms, but its doesn’t show reporters’ socioeconomic status.
When I was in college (a whopping two years ago), if you didn’t intern, you didn’t get “in.” In fact, I couldn’t get my English degree without at least one school-supervised internship. According to a Yahoo! News interview with Perlin:
“This isn’t just about rough stories….This is a broader issue about work in America,” Perlin said. “There’s the question about what happens to the non-interns. The people who can’t pay to play. People who can’t…break into the world of white collar work, which is where increasingly high level influential, highly paid jobs are in our economy. If to get into that sort of layer of the white collar world, you have to work for several months unpaid, you have to live often in cities like Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, they’re expensive to live in.”
I don’t want the daunting internship experience to intimidate first-generation college kids who are thinking of going into journalism. We need you in our newsrooms, and so do our readers. I’m going to dedicate a few posts to the scrappy students out there looking to get into the media on their own dollar, who will probably have to take a part-time job to support their internships. Are there any of you left? If so, drop me a line, tell me about yourself and ask me a question. I can’t tell you everything about journalism (I’m new here myself), but I can tell you how I got here so you can get to where you’re going too.
