Interns recently paid as much as $42,500 for a chance to labor for nothing at vaunted media institutions like Vogue magazine. Yahoo News has more:
Want to “jump-start your career in the blogosphere” by way of the Huffington Post? That’ll cost $9,000. How about spending a couple weeks strolling the rarefied halls at Vanity Fair? Try $2,900. Or maybe you’d rather get some face time with Anna Wintour at Vogue? Well, you’ll have to dig $42,500 out of the bottom of your Hermes Birkin bag for that one.
Those are a few of the winning bids from a recently closed auction to support the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
While dropping $9,000 to work — for free! — at the Huffington Post is certainly a lot of money, it’s actually down from last year’s winning bid of $13,000. Other winning bids this year: A week at Esquire went for $1,000, while internships at Black Enterprise and Niche Media brought in $550 and $500, respectively.
For other media-related auctions, the winners don’t have to work at all, instead getting the opportunity to meet cable news personalities, such as Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly ($8,000) and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” roster of hosts ($3,250). However, as usual, the cable star system can’t compete with the network queen of daytime talk. The chance to commune with Oprah Winfrey fetched a cool $35,000.
Intern-paid internships? I hope this is one idea that never spreads.
