Summer Editorial Internship - Editorial Internship ROUTE Magazine Employee Review

This is the type of internship that requires you to do all the work of a paid employee, with very little reward. I was asked to write multiple articles for the issue per month, conduct interviews for each article, and conduct article research for interviews conducted by senior staff members. I knew it was not a paid internship when I applied (beyond a 100 dollar/month stipend) so even though I was taken aback by just how much I was expected to do right off the bat without pay, I accepted it because I knew I would gain valuable experience. What made me more frustrated, however, was finding out that I would not receive any visible credit in the magazine for the articles I had written. I was listed on the staff page as an 'Editorial Intern', but was not credited for a single piece I had written entirely on my own -- my pieces were the only ones in the entire issue that didn't have a byline crediting the writer. When I politely asked the head of the magazine about it, he told me that they had a policy of not crediting interns. As the months went by and I continued to be assigned more and more pieces that were all published, but never in my name, I began to wonder if this whole internship was just a ploy to task younger writers with an equal amount of responsibility and tasks as full-time journalists, without paying them under the guise of it being an internship. I figured that with the amount of responsibility I was assigned (with little-to-no introduction to the other staff members and training -- I remember being asked to proofread the entire upcoming issue and write multiple articles the same week I was hired), the deputy editor couldn't credit me in the print issues, because to do so would be to acknowledge that I was doing all the work of a paid journalist without being compensated. By the end of the internship, I felt a bit like I'd been scammed. I had put up with the workload and the unpaid aspect of it, but I reached a point where none of it seemed worth my time if I was not even going to be credited for all of the work I had been doing. To top it all off, when I finished the internship and still had not received any of my stipend money (which I was supposed to have been receiving every month), I had to email them multiple times about it. The staff member claimed it must have been 'lost in the mail', and it was only after my second or third email that they agreed to issue a new check. I didn't receive the check until over a month later, and I honestly think they were hoping to get away with not sending it to me at all.