Jessica Elgot

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I nearly choked on my morning brunch bar when I spotted the Guardian’s lead last week on the exploitation of interns. 

How convenient they’ve chosen to focus on the MPs who exploit interns. Well, let’s turn things right back around. I know work experience. I PERSONIFIED work experience for five years.

Let’s get one thing EXTREMELY clear. It is not the recession which has caused exploitation of work experiencers. This is a very very very very old phenomena. It has just meant there are more people willing to be exploited. Just like the recession hasn’t actually caused the crisis in the media in general, it’s just speeding things up a bit. 

My mum pointed out the other day in said Guardian there was a page on office fashion. One outfit for chief executive, one for middle manager, one for personal assistants, one for your first job and one for….interns. There’s so bloody many of them, there’s even their own fashion category. Jesus.

Exploitation is taken for granted, and there are hundreds of thousands of us lining up to be exploited. I spent every summer since I was 17 working for free on local papers. I spent every weekend at university editing the local paper. What did I gain from this financially? Nothing, absolutely zero. If anyone had offered me expenses I’d have been amazed.

What did I gain experience-wise?

CLICHED ANSWER: Of course I learnt everything I know about journalism, and it was like, so totally worth it

TRUTH: It was patchy to say the least.

I had some places that were beyond wonderful. My internships at BBC Radio Five Live, Yorkshire Evening Post and at the Jewish Chronicle were fabulous. Why? Not because they went above and beyond the call of duty, because quite frankly, they didn’t. They just stood up to the mark. They taught me hard lessons about my copy, they gave me real stories, not press releases, they let me sit in on conferences, they let me do interviews and they got me published and they remembered my name.

Others were utter shite. One paper had the audacity to say “I hope you haven’t come down to London especially to do this, or cancelled anything, because sometimes people do, and then we get embarrassed.”

So you should be embarrassed! Of course people come to London especially, what do you bloody think?

And while I’m having a rant, the Guardian, for all their preaching are as bad. I’d even go so far as to say they were worse just because of the sheer audacity of their summer work experience scheme exclusively for ethnic minorities. I’m really all for widening access but sorry Guardian, no cigar. All you’ll get is rich, middle-class ethnic minorities whose parents can support them while they undertake unpaid work. What about working class white people? Fuck them shall we? They don’t fit in a diversity tick box.

What would really widen participation, would be to pay these interns. Like the one who probably did the research for the article. My humblest apologies to Mr Ben Carter (as in who did “additional reporting by” in the Guardian’s piece) but because of the subject matter, I’m willing to take a gamble you’re an intern.

So how will we really solve this? Structured internship programmes, in an American style model, paid. It’ll sort the real wheat from the rich chaff.