Section I I Reading Comprehension Part A Text 1 Traditional media may be declining in much of the rich world, but in poor countries it is booming. The growth in private media in developing countries has spurred much of the demand, as has new technology. That is promoting journalism training in remote places, in many shapes and sizes. There may be up to 3, 000 courses which range from full degree programmes to the short-term specialist training offered widely across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Groups offering such courses include the BBC World Service Trust, the Reuters and Thomson Foundations, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) and Internews Network. Participants in the courses praise the results, while complaining about the lack of focus and coordination among some providers. Shapi Shacinda, the Reuters correspondent in Zambia and chairman of the press club in the capital, Lusaka, says that foreign-backed training in business and economic reporting has helped bring more skeptical coverage. Previously, news stories used to be taken straight from officials’ statements, he says. But governments are harder to teach. Encouraging students to probe sensitive topics may threaten their lives or livelihoods. An Iraqi journalist trained by and working with the IWPR was shot dead earlier this year. Just this week, Zambia’s minister of information asserted that state-run media should not criticize the government. Rich-country governments can be a problem too. Some try to influence the “messages” that trainers deliver. The big training groups insist that they control their own content. “We won’t be paid to do messages,” says Anthony Borden of the IWPR. Blurring the boundaries can be dangerous both for journalists and the programmes that support them, he notes. More is not always better. Quality varies wildly. Places like Bangladesh and Rwanda have been showered with training in recent years. Gratitude is mixed with the wish for better coordination. David Okwemba of Kenya's The Nation newspaper, who also helps train journalists, complains overlap between courses and providers’ failure to share information. Some courses aspire loftily to build democratic societies through a free press. The BBC trust says it aims to give a say to the common man by holding institutions—public and private—to account. Such a range of goals makes measuring results difficult. Many old news hands scoff at the notion of formal journalism education. A well-stocked and inquiring mind plus sharp penmanship are the main assets, they reckon. But even the grayest veterans of rich-world journalism still seem glad to earn extra money tutoring fresh hands in poor countries.