In the newsroomLast week a group of 16 students studying IGSCE (Cambridge) at Riviera High School visited the premises of The New Times Publications along with two of their teachers. They were taken on a guided tour by Allan Brian Ssenyonga, Education Times’ Editor. The students wanted to know how The New Times operates as a business and had many questions to ask concerning the operations of the company as well its profitability. Starting with a tour of the newsrooms of both The New Times and Izuba (our Kinyarwanda language sister paper) the students got to see how the journalists go about preparing news for publication. They also visited the circulation office and were happy to see some of the oldest newspapers.

At the human resource office they wondered why the office had only women and whether there was a gender-based explanation for that. "Well even during the interviews most of the applicants were women, said Annet Kazaire the HR manager.  The business minded students spent a lot of time in the marketing department listening to the duo of Donath Ndayisaba and David Mpanja who basically explained to the students how the paper makes money.

Obviously they had many questions concerning the reach of the newspaper and how it performs online. "We actually get over 25 million online readers in a month, more than the population of Rwanda,” Donath Ndayisaba pointed out. 

It would be very beneficial for more students or schools to regularly visit industries and other businesses as they stand to learn a lot from such trips.