Here's an entertaining article about journalism and internships in the US...

Intern or Die
Why internships in journalism are bad for young people, and bad for the industry.

Essentially, it's an account of the pitfalls of "journalism's reliance upon internship experience..." despite it being "an essentially merit-based system that rewards young people who've put in time above and beyond what their schooling required"

I'm not certain how this transfers to the UK, or the rest of the EU for that matter, but what I learn from this is that a good writer can engage a reader without actually saying a huge amount.

The exceptions being the below...

"An inexperienced recent graduate, English major though she may be, is not going to waltz into a job in The New Yorker's mail room--let alone as an editorial assistant--just because she's a longtime fan of the magazine whose term paper on the avant-garde was one of the most insightful that her English professor had read in years...

"Magazine internships often function as a sort of finishing school for rough-edged college students; they don't always create better editors and reporters, but they certainly teach them the journalistic equivalent of knowing which is the salad fork.