For those born of more modest means, the goings were a bit rougher. Ms. Indvik said without her parents’ financial help, she “absolutely” could not have done the internship, which lasted four months and was initially unpaid, but by the end paid a stipend — of $12 a day.

Ms. Lai, for her part, said she believed that Condé Nast should at least be able to pay its interns minimum wage. She is earning school credit for her two-and-a-half-month internship, but the only payment she is getting is a $1,200 stipend from Medill.

Still, not all former Condé Nast interns fully agreed with the premise of the lawsuit. Stephanie Cain, an editor at an e-commerce start-up who interned in 2008 at Brides magazine, another Condé Nast publication, said she had never expected to get paid for journalism internships. Besides, she viewed the Brides internship, which continues to open doors, as akin to auditing a class, “And you don’t expect to be paid for auditing a class,” she said.

Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Politico who interned at The New Yorker in 2006 and 2007, said going into an internship knowing it paid little or nothing and then complaining about it, and suing, seemed “disingenuous.” For him, the internship turned out to be a gift that kept on giving. Beyond earning school credit, he said, he learned tools of the trade from writers like Mr. Packer and Ms. Kramer, and also got job recommendations.

Another former intern, Michael Humphrey, a freelance writer and a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University, said, “Having The New Yorker on your résumé does amazing things for you.” While he would not have minded more pay — he earned $500 for a semester’s work — he said the real value came in the experience and relationships built. “It helped verify that I was serious about the business,” he said.

Yet Andrew Nusca, an editor at CBS Interactive who interned in 2007 at Men’s Vogue, now closed, said he could see both sides. On the one hand, overseeing interns requires extra work. On the other, working for next to nothing seemed especially cruel in the country’s most expensive city.

He worked his tail off, he said, “and I certainly did not make nearly as much money as I really needed to live in New York.”