Gawker Prevails In Intern Suit

A judge has found that a man who worked at Gawker Media’s video game blog was the primary beneficiary of his internship arrangement, and therefore was properly classified as an intern. That determination was made using the standard established in the July 2015 ruling concerning interns working on Fox Searchlight’s Black Swan. In that ruling, a federal appeals court found that “an employment relationship is not created when the tangible and intangible benefits provided to the intern are greater than the intern’s contribution to the employer’s operation.” In the case of Aulister Mark’s internship at Gawker, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan determined that Mark had no expectation of compensation, received academic credit, and that it did not appear Gawker used interns to displace paid employees. Given those factors, “Mark’s time with Kotaku was a bona fide internship in which Mark traded his labor for significant vocational and educational benefits, and these benefits outweighed those received by Defendants in the form of Mark’s work,” Nathan wrote.