Hispanic College Students Need More Internships – the Paying Kind

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EL PASO, Texas — This is not a diatribe against employers who abuse unpaid interns – promise. But an entreaty for the news industry, media companies and others to step up to offer more internships – the kind that pay students to leave home for a few months every summer, learn to navigate a new environment and obtain advanced work skills. The subject is on my mind because of a recent story in the New York Times about employers who bring on interns and ask them to answer routine email, sweep or polish doorknobs instead of letting them do substantial work assignments. The story notes that some states and the federal government are cracking down on employers who “are illegally using” interns for “free labor. While the story doesn’t offer hard data on offending employers or the prevalence of unpaid internships, it does quote a career development officer at a nationally ranked university who “sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is mushrooming.”

This conclusion doesn’t surprise in light of the recession, depressing job market aggravated in my industry – news media – by the contraction of print and broadcast media newsrooms with the concurrent shift to online news.

Adapting to the Shrinking World of Television News

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EL PASO, Texas — The entire crew stood in the studio, which is where we have our station-wide meetings. There had been rumors that the station was being sold, cutbacks were being made and people were getting fired. It turned out that the station was not being sold. However, there were cutbacks and people were fired as a result of the country’s current economic crisis. This was a good  example of the current trend in television news. With the way things are going, many jobs are being consolidated into single positions. It’s something that our station has been doing for years. The job I currently hold as a graphic artist, is essentially three jobs at other stations. And the way things are going, those stations will be following suit. All this time I thought our station was cheap, but we were really trendsetters. The consolidation of jobs is not only evident in production but in news as well. Our station has hired its first official video-journalist, which is essentially a “one-man band” reporter/photographer.