Complaint Review: White Digital Media

I worked with White Digital Media for three months as a social media intern last summer in their Carlsbad headquarters. I dont know what has changed since then so please dont take this as a conclusive view of how things are now; I just want to give potential employees or clients an idea of what I saw in my brief time there.

Since this was my first internship while I was finishing up school, I didnt know what to expect from a company, but I immediately found it odd that in the marketing department, everyone sat around their own laptop, headphones in, creating fake social media profiles (with fake names) and commenting on articles from the various WDM properties to create the illusion that people were reading the articles. As far as I know, its still happening now. If you look through any of the companys FB pages, its just employees talking to each other.

Honestly, these social media initiatives took up about 95% of my time there. To get credit for my internship, I had to make up extra responsibilities since my teacher/advisor felt (as did I) that I learned nothing, and spent my time doing vaguely unethical things.

Occasionally we would get a break from this and were instead tasked with going through other digital magazines and taking snapshots of their paid Front of Book ads, so that we could then put them in our magazines to give people the impression that we had the same advertisers as more established competitors. I never knew if this was completely legal, though I had a feeling it was at the very least grossly unethical.

As to the complaints about Glen White, I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but on the occasions I would see him in the office, he was screaming at someone about this or that. I got a very Napoleonic vibe from him.

If you read any of the press releases put out by the company (they put out thousands, though few are ever read by anyone other than the proofreader at the press release company), they talk about how great their internship program is and that it leads to full time employment, which as far as I could see was true, since interns with no experience were immediately promoted to managers and editors and "project managers", though at intern wages.

The program goes something like this: intern for three months on very little pay (at the time $100 per week), then becoming a temp employee for another three months while youre still paid next to nothing and are not eligible for any benefits, and then after those come on as a full time employee, though still making less than a full time WalMart Cashier.