Internship Feature

Intense debate swirled around the blogosphere last spring following the conclusion of an online charity auction. The event, hosted by the Manhattan-based website Charity Buzz, was held in benefit of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights; the scandal arose after an anonymous bidder snapped up the evening’s prize for a cool $42,500.

The auction’s hosts had not exaggerated when they called their prize “a dream package.” But it was not a celebrated piece of art, or a luxury sports car. It was most certainly not an exotic vacation.

It was an unpaid, one-week internship at Vogue, and it had been donated by reigning fashion titan, Anna Wintour.

Charity Buzz, the company responsible for auctioning off a growing number of internships including the one donated by Ms. Wintour, is a prime example of the rising value of unpaid internships.

The company, which launched in 2004 and now includes a staff of over 40 people, describes their mission as pursuing “increasingly cutting-edge ways to harness technology and pop-culture to benefit our nonprofit partners and provide even greater opportunities for our bidders.”

At any given time their website offers a slew of high profile internships from magazines like Rolling Stone and Harpers Bazaar, to fashion houses like Versace and Diane Von Furstenberg, and even to brokerage firms like Cantor Fitzgerald.

For overzealous parents, Charity Buzz represents yet another new way to pave the way for their offspring. In a 2008 article by The New York Times entitled “To the Highest Bidder”, Kathi Cline of Tuxedo Park, NY described the $4,500 internship she purchased at Harper’s Bazaar through Charity Buzz—a Christmas gift for her stepdaughter—as a way to narrow down her career path.

“She wants to go into the fashion industry, but she’s not sure what aspect she wanted,” said Cline.

The Times article did not pass by without receiving its share of moral indignation. An essay by Anthony Paletta posted just two days later, to the website “Minding the Campus, challenged that internship auctions were just one of many increasingly elitist (or as Paletta says, “bizarre”) practices aimed at getting the children of wealthy parents into the best colleges possible.

“At least the auction is admirably direct,” wrote Paletta. “It makes no pretense of rewarding merit, highly unlike the countless internships gained through nepotism that now masquerade as genuine accomplishment.”


For several years now, insiders and observers alike have called the state of the publishing industry a “crisis.” Even amidst claims that the industry has started to rebound, The Pew Research Center came out with a report this year, which found that, “circulation for the magazine industry as a whole dropped 1.5%” in 2010.

But while the bad economy has led to a shortage of jobs, it has not led to a shortage of internships. Nicole Wolfrath, Associate Director of Internships and Career Services at The New School, said that on the contrary, she witnessed an increase in the number of internship offerings this year, an effect she attributes to company downsizing.

“Basically the roles of interns have changed due to company layoffs,” said Wolfrath. “I've read an example of a full time position being eliminated and responsibilities spread amongst two newly developed unpaid internships.”

Such examples, though they undoubtedly occur, breach national regulations aimed at protecting interns from exploitation. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor revised its factsheet for unpaid internships, adding a new caveat that interns must not be permitted to displace regular employees, and must be supervised by the existing staff.

Their factsheet also includes two other regularly flouted guidelines: that intern responsibilities should be similar to training that could be received in an educational setting, and that the internship employer should not directly benefit from activities of the intern.

But in practice, employers often use interns to complete necessary tasks that would ordinarily be designated to employees, minus the pay.

“College career centers have expressed concern that students are being treated as employees but not compensated as such,” said Wolfrath.

Caylin Harris, an Editorial Assistant at Good Housekeeping and Director of the “60 Minute Mentor Program” at the website Ed2010, described internships as increasingly crucial, especially in industries like publishing.

Part of Harris’s job at Ed2010 is to pair up recent graduates with mentors in the magazine industry and to dispatch career advice. Harris observed that it has now become common for people striving for a career in journalism to pursue internships even after graduating college.

Unlike most career and internship counselors, Harris’s knowledge comes from personal experience. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse in 2009, Harris found herself in what has today become a routine predicament—armed with a diploma, but lacking any immediate job prospects.

In total, she completed four internships after graduating (while living at home, and babysitting in her spare time), at magazines that included The Week, Pilates Style, Parents Magazine, and W. Rather than being remorseful about the bleak situation, Harris viewed the challenge as an opportunity to prove her commitment and work ethic to those who could vouch for her in the future .

“I sort of looked at it as, ‘It’s a horrible economy, people that are really talented are losing their jobs and I just need to do whatever I can to prove that I really want to be here, and I really want to be doing this’,” said Harris.

“I’ve seen people that have graduated doing internships, and honestly I think it’s a smart thing, because it keeps you in the industry,” she added. “It keeps you around people that, if you do a great job and you work really hard, you know you’ll hopefully at least make a good impression on.”

“From a counselor’s perspective, I can tell you that I've seen many post graduates open to interning since securing full time positions are difficult,” said Wolfrath of The New School. “There are many graduate students with tons of experience similar to alums. All of these individuals are applying for the same internships undergraduates are.”

Harris reaffirmed that increased competition has led to a steady rise in the number of internships that are considered “standard” during college—from 1 or 2, 10 years ago to 5,6, or even 7, now.

But when asked about company downsizing, Harris denied having heard about jobs being outright replaced by interns, though she did concede that many interns are now being assigned greater responsibilities due to the bad economy.

“There might be less [Editorial Assistants] at a magazine, or they’re using more interns,” said Harris. “I think maybe interns are just getting the opportunity to have more responsibility, because there’s more work and less people.”

“Obviously yes, it’s important to get good grades, and it’s important to graduate from school,” said Harris. “But at the same time, I feel like the people that hired me today didn’t care about what my GPA was; they wanted to know where I had been an intern.”

Charity Buzz did not respond to inquiries for this article.