By Jerry Ceppos

I used to chide broadcast friends, who tell me that they almost never pay summer interns. I always thought it was important, legally and morally, for important institutions to pay employees. (I remember how proud I was of that $67 a week that I earned in my first internship at the Frederick, Md., News-Post. Of course, that figure counted night differential.)

Now my friend Walter Middlebrook of the Detroit News passes along an amazing story
from Notre Dame Magazine saying that the university has purchased internships from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Concord Monitor and the Los Angeles Times “to take on Notre Dame summer interns. The (journalism) program’s endowment will fund the salaries of the news interns at the Inquirer and the Monitor, while the Times sports-reporting internship will be funded by a private donor.”

In today’s topsy-turvy media world, I’ve come to expect almost anything. But buying internships almost makes Murdoch control of Dow Jones seem like no big deal.

Here’s why:

–Interns who are carefully chosen work at least as hard as regular staff members. Newspapers should pay them.
–Profitable institutions, such as newspapers (yes, even today, almost every newspaper makes big profits) should help non-profit institutions, not the other way around.
–If this ridiculous scheme catches on, poor universities, often with poor students, will find themselves at the bottom of the food chain yet again.

Let’s allow the free market to control internships. In relatively good times—or perhaps in bad times when lots of “permanent” employees have been laid off—newspapers will jump at the chance to hire eager employees who can be paid low salaries. When things get tough, newspapers will scale back on internships, as they always have, and some deserving kids will freelance or otherwise figure out how to get experience.

Any of those options is better than putting the squeeze on universities to pay the salaries of newspaper employees.