SECTOR 4 at the different tertiary institutions and so they have to deal with what they feel is a disconnect between the knowledge being provided at tertiary institutions and the requirements of the newsrooms. “It’s high time that Human Resources personnel really scrutinise the degrees of the people they recruit for the newsrooms. New recruits will have multimedia design courses, web design, graphics, motion graphics and Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism. There are students who will tell you they have done an associate degree in television or in journalism or digital video. You have to scrutinise this because somebody who has done an associate degree in video will have no idea about many things relating to journalism. I think it’s high time to scrutinise the course content of (academic) programmes.” “Generally the education system in this country is terrible. The University of Botswana is still the best institution in the country or it’s perceived to be the best so they get a slightly better quality of students. So if you get someone from UB they can probably construct a sentence slightly better than someone from another institution. The education system in the country is a problem, not only in these institutions but also going back to primary schools.” Many students enter journalism for the wrong reasons or with unrealistic expectations. There are students who want to be celebrities and become disappointed and disillusioned when they realise that journalism will not provide them with instant fame. “The structure of our sponsorship is that you can’t pull out. So we have this bunch of students that are pushing, and we are pushing them to get out of the programme. They are not interested. When they are not interested you also are not that motivated to push them.” “So you find that there are people that think that being a journalist is about looking good, it’s about all of that. They don’t have the gift, they don’t have that call of the profession - they think it’s just this glam thing and sadly it becomes very evident in the newsroom where you have this person who just looks like a celebrity, a model in the newsroom, and cannot do stories.” Since the media industry does not undertake surveys, it fails to understand the training needs of the media sector. The rapid transformation of the media sector makes it more critical than ever before for mid-career journalists to be capacitated, but this is difficult as most media houses are either unable or unwilling to spend resources on further training. The few media houses that have offered in-house training are engaging consultants whose knowledge is sound but outdated, 60 AFRICAN MEDIA BAROMETER Botswana 2014