My Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism colleagues Chris Faraone, John Loftus, Linda Pinkow and I are not shy about singing the praises of our reporting interns whenever we have the chance. But after running our internship program for over eight years, even we are shocked at how talented our current crew of interns is … and how many of them have joined us this fall. I mean, we have a tiny staff of 3.25 and our “intern army” is currently 21* strong!
But here’s what: Our base intern rate for a short feature article of 700-1200 words is the same as the rate we pay professional journalists for the same work, $150. And we naturally pay more for longer articles that some interns produce from time to time. And, like all our journalists, our interns keep all the rights to their articles except the limited rights we buy to post their stories on our website and store them on our servers—which is sadly rare in this era when forcing freelance journalists to sell all rights to their work for generally paltry sums has become the norm.
Also, once interns publish one article with us, we also are happy to recommend them future degree programs they decide to pursue or jobs they try to get. Our feeling is that we want to do everything we can to help them start careers in a journalism industry that sadly is in terminal collapse.
Still, we don’t think we’re able to give them the level of support they deserve. What we’d really like is to be able to pay them all a nice monthly stipend to help them get through school if they’re in school or just make a living (and pay off their outrageously huge student loans) if they recently finished school. And since we’re always laboring mightily to pay our own small and inoffensive salaries, we have never been able to do that to date.
So, we figured that we should ask our faithful audience if any of you might have a line on some education or vocational grants that we could apply for that could allow us to experiment with a monthly stipend program for our excellent intern army. We’ve been looking for months and we’re quite practiced at fundraising for journalism, but we’re not seeing grant opportunities that fit the bill in question.
Any help along those lines is appreciated. And if any of you just know some people with a couple of bucks who are interested in this kind of educational program for young journalists, any introductions would be most welcome. Drop us a line at info[at]binj.news and we’ll chat.
Jason Pramas is executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and editor-in-chief of BINJ.News.
*when I posted this editor’s note earlier today (Dec. 12, 2025), we had 19 active interns, but two more interns just started later in the same day bringing the total to 21—a new record, wow!
