Media-intern auction winners pay for chance to work for free
Breaking into the media business is tough, with a seemingly endless supply of bright young college graduates vying for unpaid internships at elite publications. Still, there's another route to getting one's foot in the door, if you have money to burn: Win an auction!
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.
Perhaps to offset the appearance that only wealthy interns would get inside, each publication also created a slot that doesn't cost anything, according to the RFK Center.
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.