"Today, a typical journalist in Africa is a professional workshop attendee. Non-governmental organisations from every sector “train” journalists in their subject matter, often with content conceived in Western capitals by people with no experience in journalism or in the target countries. Journalists go from workshop to workshop, turning up long enough to collect their per diems and write a puff piece. This approach is as costly as it is regrettable. In one African country, a media-development organisation with which I have worked spent more than $1-million of taxpayer money to produce a one-hour program on governance, which was then aired on community radio, its content so sanitised to appease local officials that few people tuned in. But even more problematic was the distortion to the domestic media market. To produce the program, the NGO recruited ten top journalists from established outlets and paid them as much as ten times their normal salary. Once the project was over, most of the journalists quit their old jobs in search of better pay in the aid and government sectors. From my experience, most African journalists know how to report a well-sourced story. What they lack are the resources to put this knowledge to use. The deficiencies of African media are best addressed as a business challenge, not a training problem." (Author)