The New York Times | ProPublica
Former New Yorker intern Matthew Leib and former W Magazine intern Lauren Ballinger are suing Conde Nast, saying they weren't paid minimum wage. Their suit says Leib "was paid $300 to $500 for each summer he worked," Christine Haughney reports.

Ballinger tells Haughney she "was paid $12 a day to work in W’s accessories department."

She said that even one of the editors at W marveled how poor their work conditions were.

The editor said the job was reminiscent of Anne Hathaway’s job in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but worse, “because we don’t get any makeover in the end,” Ms. Ballinger said in the interview.

Leib and Ballinger asked for class action status for their suit, which like several other high-profile lawsuits regarding internships is being handled by the law firm Outten & Golden. The firm represented two interns who sued Fox Searchlight Pictures for their work on the 2010 film "The Black Swan"; a judge ruled Tuesday that Fox Searchlight violated labor laws. (more...)

New York Magazine
Hearst lawyers are preparing to defend themselves against a class-action lawsuit from unpaid interns, by reaching out to former interns who might attest to "the opportunities and experiences they received."

New York Magazine reprinted an email that it says was sent to a number of former Harper's Bazaar interns asking if they would talk to a Hearst lawyer.

As Poynter previously reported, Diana Wang, former “Head Accessories Intern” at Harper’s Bazaar, sued Hearst for not paying her. Lawyers estimate about 3,000 former interns may be eligible to join the class, but as of September only three others had done so.

Hearst requires that interns receive college credit for their experiences, and a Hearst VP previously told Poynter that Wang "misrepresented that she was a student, when in fact, she was not."

Earlier: How to tell when unpaid internships are opportunities, when they’re an abuse | News organizations should rethink unpaid internships

Random House
Alexandra Kimball's personal before-and-after experience with inherited wealth leads her to argue that journalism has become an industry accessible only to the privileged classes. When you can't afford to take unpaid internships or pay your dues with little salary, you find few open doors, she says.

Poverty doesn’t allow you to develop a linear career trajectory or a coherent professional identity, because when cash is hard to come by, you do whatever job will bring you more of it. But when you apply this short-term logic to a creative field, especially one that requires as much patience and investment and dues-paying as journalism, you come away with nothing.

To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of “work” that is most easily gained from privilege. It requires a sense of entitlement, the ability to network and self-promote without seeing yourself as an arrogant, schmoozing blowhard. And it requires you to think of working for free—at an internship, say, or on one of those gratis assignments that seem to be everywhere now—as an opportunity rather than an insult or a scam. (more...)

Q: There is a job opening at the station where I did my internship over three years ago. I have only kept up once with the station during the three-year period. How do I inquire about the job opening?

David… Read more

This is your reminder to get hustling on those summer internship applications and to get them out. It may seem early, but it isn’t really if you want to contend for the best.

Law firms hired next summer’s associates in … Read more