I wonder if any other young people who work in the media spotted the irony in yesterday’s Guardian front page story.
Newspapers, and I think the media generally, are notorious for expecting students and graduates to do unpaid placements – a month is usually mandatory on NCTJ postgrad courses and many of the keener or more connected hopefuls do quite a bit more.
For the students, it gives you the chance to play the game – to collect much-needed bylines that you then have to produce when applying for jobs. But for editors, who in my six year career have visibly relied more on more on untrained students, it’s easy way around the redundancies and cost-cutting they’re all being forced to put through.
The losers are the readers though – you can’t send a work experience kid – even one in their 20s – to court, and really shouldn’t be using them on sensitive or legally tricky stories. The Guardian and its stable-mates – Manchester Evening News included – are as bad as any other media firm when it comes to this kind of “exploitation”.
I’d be amazed if Private Eye doesn’t have some comment to make about this next week.