Interning and tax liability

Buffalo.com photo by Matt and Angela Brown.

At yesterday's tour, Don Nieman asked a good question about the issue of tax liability and serving as an intern. Today, we received an official response from our legal department, and basically, this should not be an issue for the folks in the Buffalo.com internship program.

Before I go into the official explanation, let me explain the background for people who may not know what the heck I am referring to.

Last week, Lee Coppola, the Dean of Journalism at St. Bonaventure University gave an interview on WBFO-FM in which he discussed the possibility that citizen journalists who give their services to for-profit news organizations may be required to pay a "gift" tax on their work if they exceed a certain threshold - the threshold used in the interview is $12,000 annually. The interview, if you'd like to listen, is here.

The source of this line of thinking was a recent article at a Web site entitled stinkyjournalism.org. If you follow that link, you will go to the article in question.

First of all, if this were, in fact, the case, and the IRS was going to actively pursue citizen journalists - something that would seem to be very difficult, because determining the value of content and the work involved would be hard to pin down to a certain, universal standard - I do not feel that any of our contributors would be affected because, individually, there is no one who is doing $12,000 worth of work. This is not a statement on the quality of the work - there's just no one who puts in that many hours, takes that many photos, writes that many stories.

We posited this question to our legal team, though, and they noted that the work of an intern would only be a "gift" if the intern received nothing in return. Our interns, in fact, receive "something" in return - access to our platform, community recognition, etc. These are valuable commodities to many citizen journalists and photographers - exposure for work that would otherwise receive no similar publicity. As a result, it's a trade, not a gift.

And, of course, there are various freedom of speech issues involved, and it just seems like this would be an incredibly prickly path for the federal or state government to tread. I don't expect to see it.

I understand stinkyjournalism.org's concern about citizen journalism, journalistic standards, and free content in a time of recession, but I feel like this is a fringe argument that walks the line of fear-mongering.

Anyhow, I hope it didn't seem like I was skirting the question yesterday, as it is legitimately something to discuss, and I thank Don for raising the point. If you have any questions, please let me know.