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Twitter Hunting for Head of News and Journalism

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:51:44 GMT

Twitter is searching for a "head of news and journalism," according to a recent job posting from the micro-blogging service. The position could be based in New York City or San Francisco, but Twitter is "looking for a seasoned leader to shape and drive the next growth phase of Twitter's partnership with the news industry."
The person selected will be "responsible for devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks."

Other job requirements include coming up with a multiyear strategy for news, partnership management, the ability to be creative, ensuring that Twitter messaging dominates the industry, and more. The ideal candidate will have "deep experience" managing journalists and executing strategic partnerships. Ultimately, the goal is to increase journalists' participation on Twitter and use of Twitter products on news sites and networks.

Twitter is not the first tech company to hire journalists to curate its content or create "branded content," but the approach has had mixed results. Last month, Tumblr fired several editorial staffers who were in charge of managing the site's online content. According to Tumblr co-founder, David Karp, the effort, named Storyboard, was a concept intended to "tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way – focusing on the people, their work, and their stories." When PCMag talked to Karp in Jan. 2012 Tumblr had an editorial team of one. The idea, he said at the time, was to highlight "stuff going on in our community."

Weeks after that interview, Facebook hired a managing editor to do something similar to the Storyboard idea, dubbed Facebook Stories. By March of this year, however, Dan Fletcher left the project saying that his position title was misleading and that "the company doesn't need reporters."Twitter, however, has played a bigger role in breaking news lately than a site like Facebook or Tumblr, for better or worse. It's no longer surprising to hear about a major event - like the Boston Marathon bombings - on Twitter first, while journalists increasingly cite tweets or pull tweeted photos from those on the ground of large news events. For more on that, check out Did Twitter 'Own' the Boston Story?

Source: pcmag

“Being a journalist is a splendid profession…

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:41:31 GMT

Alexey Simonov was speaking to some 120 journalists from Russia, Finland, Norway and Sweden who gathered at the Barents Press annual meeting in Apatity last weekend. “Being a journalist in Russia is no longer just an interesting job. Sometimes journalists pay a very high price for what they report on. Over the last 10 years, none Finnish, Norwegian or Swedish journalists have been killed at work. But in the same period we have lost 16 media people only in the Republic of Dagestan,” Simonov told the audience.

He continued: “In the 90ties, many journalists were killed by people linked to different businesses. Over the last 10 years, most journalist murder cases are unsolved in the way that we still don't know who ordered the liquidations.”The Glasnost Defense Fund was founded in 1991 to defend the rights of journalists and to advocate freedom of the press throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union. Alexey Simonov is also a member of the Union of Russian journalists and the Moscow Helsinki Group.

Accreditation for foreign journalists reporting from inside Russia was debated at the Barents Press annual meeting. The journalist network has recently made a call to the Prime Ministers of the Barents Region to abolish the demand for journalist accreditation. Barents Press hopes this will be included in the new declaration outlining the future of the Barents cooperation. The new, so-called Kirkenes-declaration II, will be signed in early June.

Alexey Simonov says the way the demand for accreditation is interpreted today is unlawful. “The text in the journalist accreditation law says its aim is to help journalists to get access to information. Today, accreditation is used to hinder journalists’ access to information,” says Simonov.

“In the same way, accreditation is a way to stop foreign journalists.”“FSB can place a foreign journalist on the PNG-list (Persona Non Grata) without having to give any reasons. Who ends up on the list and why is unknown for the public as well as for the person who suddenly find himself unwanted,” explains the chairman of the Glasnost Foundation.

Source: barentsobserver

This sort of journalism has no place in a modern country

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:47:20 GMT

Please allow me to use your letter columns to comment on the continued abuse of the state owned National Communications Network (NCN) by the Government of Guyana. Quite apart from the malicious propaganda broadcast by this state agency gone rogue, there are other harmful aspects to the blatant subordination of its duty to inform, to the political agenda of Central Government.

Last year’s revelations of what is clearly a culture of corruption within NCN illustrates the nexus between such political interference in an organization’s operation and the type of leadership it attracts. The credibility of the State as an institution transcends passing governments, and once destroyed is not easily restored. One may argue that this credibility was destroyed before the assumption to power of the PPP-C Government, but the fact remains that this government is now a deliberate contributor to this phenomenon. Moreover, the credibility of the State spills into a number of areas that affect the wellbeing of our country. A lack of public trust will undermine the best efforts at policing, tax collecting and economic expansion, all of which are critical to this country’s development and none of which are happening at optimal levels.

As with lost credibility, abuse of authority does not easily reverse itself once unleashed. Au contraire, it quickly spreads to other parts, assuming new forms and generally creating a comfort zone for those individuals who, like maggots, thrive in what is for most an unhealthy environment.

What a society is prepared to tolerate does give some indication of the quality of that society, and the silence of so many Guyanese on such a fundamental issue paints an unflattering picture. One wonders whether this glaring misuse of the state media has totally escaped the notice of the advertising profession, or at least that of its clientele whose dollars are funding this organization.

When one contemplates the sinister objective behind the skewed political coverage provided by NCN, it becomes clear that NCN is the single most effective tool in the PPP-C’s propaganda machinery. The problem is that NCN belongs to the state and not the PPP-C, and it therefore has a responsibility to ensure that all political parties are allowed equal access to their facilities. It might also be a good time to point out that this responsibility is in no way linked to parliamentary approval of its annual subvention from the nation’s consolidated fund. In other words, the fact that for two years in a row NCN has been denied this subvention by the National Assembly does not entitle it to discriminate against those political parties which refused to approve these funds.

I happened to watch a news broadcast on NCN earlier this week during which exclusive coverage was given to the Government’s version of the budget deliberations. Not a single opposition member was interviewed as Minister after Minister lamented the vindictive and irresponsible actions of the opposition in not approving the estimates under the Ministry of Public Works’ Transport Capital program heading. This sort of journalism has no place in a modern country. It belongs behind an iron curtain.

A few members of the private sector were also shown adding their views which, unsurprisingly, mirrored those of the governing party, with two of these gentlemen using words like unfathomable, unthinkable and thoughtless to describe the opposition’s actions. Quite apart from my personal views on the priority of a new terminal building for the Cheddi Jagan International Airport and their obvious partiality deriving from personal interests in this particular project, I wondered whether these gentlemen were aware that their comments would be used by NCN to further the partisan objectives of the Governing party.

I believe that the time has come for NCN to be given the recognition it deserves as an organ of propaganda and misinformation. It does not matter how entertaining or how interesting the rest of the programming might be, as long as its newscasts and its political talk shows continue along current lines, this entity is in effect an enemy of the people of this country. Those who support this organization can no longer feign innocence; they are contributing to a national problem.

I have listened to the argument emanating from high up this Government that the state media has a duty to correct or counter the lies and misinformation being peddled by the opposition media and hence its apparent lack of balance. This is utter nonsense no matter how it is phrased. Those making such utterances are clearly appealing to the very minds they have helped to under-develop over the last twenty years.

To sum up what I am saying, I do not believe that, left to its own devices, NCN will morph into a decent and responsible national television station anytime soon. New devices need to be deployed to force this to happen and the people of Guyana need to reject this insult to their intelligence. I have stopped just short of recommending some sort of boycott of products or businesses advertised on this station because I feel that this should be a last resort, however, it is an option that we should seriously consider if NCN continues its refusal to represent the views of the opposition in its broadcasts.

Source: kaieteurnewsonline

Pipelines, Pulitzers and Independent Online Journalism

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:29:48 GMT

I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch and weigh in on the illuminating online chat I had yesterday with Inside Climate News publisher David Sassoon, editor Susan White and reporter Lisa Song.

We explored the comprehensive series of articles on environmental risks from America’s fast-growing maze of oil pipelines that earned the tiny, foundation-supported Web site the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Monday.

This is the third online news outlet to win a Pulitzer (one prize for Huffington Post and two for Pro Publica). There’ll surely be more. [Read Brian Stelter's column, as well: "A Pulitzer Prize, but Without a Newsroom to Put It In."]

In our Google+ Hangout, we talk about the site’s reporting package, which charted the causes, impacts and significance of a million-gallon spill of diluted bitumen in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010 but expanded to look at the outdated rules for pipeline monitoring and safety. Bitumen is the very crude oil extracted from Canada’s enormous deposits of oil sands. Early on, Inside Climate News began using the shorthand “dilbit” for this substance and the name is catching on, including in the title of the new e-book consolidating the reporting — “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of.”

One of my questions:

Is the solution to ban pipelines or to have more rigorous oversight?
Susan White replied:

The idea that we’re building pipelines using rules and regulations that are out of date is appalling. Forget whether you want pipelines or you want Canadian crude oil. That’s a separate debate…. More than 10,000 miles of new or repurposed pipelines are planned for the United States in the next few years. Why aren’t we making sure that they’re safer?
I noted that it appeared to me that prominent environmental groups don’t want to discuss safer pipelines:

As soon as you say you want to make it safer you’re basically saying it’s okay.
Sassoon said this dynamic exists, and shifted the chat toward the pipeline of the moment, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline extension that would allow more Canadian oil to flow to American refineries:

We don’t have an energy and climate policy in this country. So Keystone is the fulcrum around which that discussion is happening, even though it’s not a particularly deep discussion.
He called for President Obama to hit the “pause” button, given the big environmental stakes and implications for climate change. [Please have a look back at Sassoon's 2012 Op-Ed article for The Times, "Crude, Dirty and Dangerous," for more.]

Lisa Song described the technologies that are available, at a cost, to improve pipeline reliability and safety. The final piece in the Pulitzer submission noted that the Keystone plan doesn’t include advanced spill-protection technology.

Then we shifted into a discussion of the financial model for Inside Climate — which was launched with grants from the Energy Foundation, Grantham Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other philanthropies — and mused on whether this kind of media outlet can be sustained and replicated.

White, in part, said:
I think the ones that survive and prosper will be the ones that focus on what we try to focus on — following the basic core tenets of good journalism and building that trust over time.

Source: dotearth.blogs.nytimes

Journalism sometimes means you are not the one to break the story

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:13:48 GMT

The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see — not to ignore it. A Reddit post seen by millions without context is worse for the story, and the public, and to the mission of reporting than the same post in a helpful and informed context seen by many more. Reporting is no longer a question of whether or not to dignify new and questionable information with attention — it’s about predicting which of it will influence the story, and explaining, debunking, or contextualizing it the best we can. That is, incidentally, what our readers want.

Source: legalinsurrection

Center, UW-Madison journalism school share role in IRE honor

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:15:33 GMT

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication played major roles in a project named a finalist in the Investigative Reporters and Editors awards, which were announced today. The investigation of campus mental health services was conducted by the Investigative Journalism Education Consortium, involving journalism students and faculty at Midwestern universities.

The project was named a finalist in the Student category. The Center’s project, Gaps persist in campus mental health services, produced in collaboration with a reporting class taught by Professor Deborah Blum, also is receiving a Milwaukee Press Club award, as recently announced. Numerous news organizations around the state have published the project. Reporting was led by Amy Karon, a former UW-Madison graduate student and Center intern who now runs a medical writing firm. Other students assisting in the project included Kate Prengaman (who now works as a Center intern), Jenny Peek, Anna Bukowski, Gayle Cottrill and Monica Hickey. Last year, IRE recognized another project from the Center and journalism school as an award finalist. That project, also led by Karon and involving several other students, examined misleading nutritional claims by the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.

Source: wisconsinwatch

Career as Journalist

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:24:08 GMT

Journalism is a great career to start with and many youngsters are lured towards this profession. It is a challenging job which requires lot of hard work and dedication but in return you enjoy ample growth and recognition in the society. All successful journalist working in various news channels enjoy a handsome salary package and other perks.

Today TV and Radio are the important medium of communication, a lot of people turn to TV for current news and updates, and hence, the role of journalist becomes very important and full of commitment and responsibilities. You could go for diploma or three years degree in Journalism. Mentioned below are some well known colleges of Journalism in Delhi

- Lady Shriram College, New- Delhi
- Delhi College Of Arts And Commerce
- Indraprastha College, New-Delhi
- JNU, New-Delhi
- Jamia Milia Islamia, New-Delhi

This is to be noted here, besides degree and diploma in Journalism, one may also go for PG diploma in various streams of Mass Communication (Journalism).

Journalists collect information on political, social and many sensitive issues and write news stories over these issues. Today, a lot of news channels have come up in the market which has opened great career opportunities in Journalism. Journalism requires outstanding communication skills. If you have good communication skills then you could become a newsreader or interview celebrities and political leaders in TV and radio.

People with excellent writing skills, could write for various newspapers, National Magazines and websites also. Newspaper is also an important medium to connect to the people and you could write news, articles and Blogs on various political and social issues of the country. Like that magazines and websites also require journalists who could write news and articles for them.

As mentioned earlier journalism has lot of challenges thus, you should be prepared to work under pressure and meet deadlines on time. Sometimes your regular working hours could also exceed due to the extensive work pressure therefore, you should be prepared to tackle these difficult circumstances in your professional life.

It is important to pursue journalism course from a prestigious college but your institute cannot guarantee your success. To become a successful journalist you need to put a lot of hard work and inability to write and present stories should be inherited in you. You could also do freelancing and work independently as a journalist. The other career options in journalism are as follows- photojournalists, proofreaders and news analyst in print and electronic media.

Today media is very powerful and journalists can influence masses with their news and articles. Journalists should not take advantage of this factor and adhere to the norms and standards of journalism. Journalists cover wide variety of areas, such as- politics, art, economics, sports, history, business, weather, entertainment and many others important areas.

Career as journalist gives you plenty of exposure; you need to travel to different regions of the country. A journalist is required to go in the remotest and sometimes unsafe areas of his/her state to cover news and making world aware about the ongoing crisis and circumstances of that particular place. The remuneration in journalism is often dependent on your years of experience, organization you are working with and your work- performance. People who are completely dedicated towards this profession have achieved lots of appraisal and good salary package.

Source: articlesbase

Online journalism consumers are "looters"

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 07:21:27 GMT

Noted crankypants Bob Garfield, co-host of On The Media, likens current consumers of (mostly free, readily-shared) online news to "looters" who "enjoy an improved standard of living."Writing in a Guardian op-ed section ironically titled "Comment is Free," Garfield says that standard of living "only stays improved until the store is emptied out."

tl;dr anyone who cares about journalism should "pray for paywalls and other subscription models to take hold." Go read the rest. Apparently it's not an April Fool's joke, but a sincere rant. Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

Source: boingboing

Journalism Grants Offered by the European Journalism Centre

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:18:50 GMT

Description
The Innovation in Development Reporting Grant Programme (IDR) is a media-funding project operated by the European Journalism Centre (EJC). The grant programme aims to advance creative reporting approaches, thus enabling a better coverage of international development issues. The grant intends to raise awareness about these issues by having a strong impact on media audiences in eight of the European countries with the highest net official development assistance: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Innovative reporting projects will be awarded considerable funding, with an aim to support journalists, editors, and development stakeholders to perform thorough research and to develop new, exciting, and even experimental reporting, employing state of the art presentation methods and techniques of journalistic storytelling.

Eligibility
Journalists and relevant media outlets that target audiences in one or more of the eight European countries with the highest net official development assistance are eligible to apply: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Media published in any of the official languages of the admissible countries may submit an application.

Journalists and media outlets not based in the countries mentioned above, as well as freelancers, are ONLY eligible to apply as cooperation partners of admissible organisations. A “letter of commitment” for the story to be published or aired by an eligible media outlet will be required from all applicants, once they have been invited to submit a full-fledged proposal.

State owned or directly government-controlled entities are NOT eligible for funding.
All projects must provide in-depth information of relevance beyond the limitations of daily news cycles. The latter must be true even if the coverage appears on the occasion of specific news events such as summits or conferences.

Projects are required to address by theme, style, and presentation the general public, or large audience segments, or must effectively leverage important multipliers. They may be one-off publications or entire series, which must be narrative, exploratory and explanatory in nature, and may be presented in a linear or non-linear fashion including text, graphics, images, animations, interactive elements, video, audio, or film. Projects aiming at cross-country cooperation and using multiple platforms are strongly encouraged to apply.

Fundings
Applicants must apply for a minimum grant of €8,000. For your reference, we expect the average grant given to be about €20,000. A maximum of 25 to 30 grants will be made available in 2013.
Applicants may apply for full or partial story funding.

Full grants may cover direct expenses for journalistic research and study trips, including travel and accommodation, possible technical costs for equipment or crew, information procurement costs (such as access to professional databases or original data gathering efforts), graphics design and visualisation, adaptation of software, and other justified costs incurred directly for the implementation of the project.
Alternatively, partial grants can be made available to top up existing reporting budgets.

The grant programme does NOT fund: salaries of permanent staff; indirect costs (overheads);expenses for the compilation and processing of data collections which are not eventually released into the public domain; purchases of equipment, machines, real-estate, general-purpose software licenses; bribes or otherwise unethical, illegal and undocumented expenses; activities violating the privacy of individuals; political campaigns or lobbying activities.

How to apply
You can apply by filling the online application form here. Deadline for applications is March 25th 2013.

Source: mladiinfo

After Leveson: end journalism's amateur romance and get professional

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:17:18 GMT

Today's extract from the book After Leveson* is by Professor Richard Sambrook, director of Cardiff University's centre for journalism. Once again, I am running it in two parts.

Sambrook started his career on local newspapers in South Wales before joining the BBC where he rose to become director of global news and the World Service. He believes Leveson offers a chance for British journalism to move away from its adherence to "a romantic notion of amateurism" in order to build professionalism…

Proposals to "professionalise" journalism are often rejected as middle class elitism which resents or fails to understand the anarchic appeal of the pugnacious, mischievous tabloid press and seeks to impose its own standards on others.

But beyond the need to avoid undue interference, it is hard to argue that the editorial qualities and culture appropriate 50 years ago should still hold sway over an industry so transformed in scale and ambition and which faces the current array of economic and technological challenges.

Indeed a lack of professional standards or a professional framework seems likely to have contributed to the current low standing and low morale of British newspaper journalism and may yet hold it back from success in an all-digital future.

A regular YouGov poll on trust among professions consistently shows journalists on red-top newspapers at the bottom. In March 2003, 14% of those polled trusted tabloid journalists, against 93% who trusted doctors, 88% teachers and 82% local police officers. Broadcast journalists died better at just over 80%, with journalists on mid- market newspapers 36%.

In the following nine years there has been a downward drift in trust overall, but in November 2012 the figures were doctors 82%, teachers 74%, 69% local police, broadcasters 44%, mid-market journalists 18% and red-top journalists just 10%.

This underlines the extent to which the British press is not really one business, which is recognised by the public. Inconveniently for those seeking reform, it is the red-top, tabloid market – the least trusted – which makes the most money. The serious upmarket newspapers – the most trusted – tend to lose money. So while the public may speak one way about trust, they say something different when they choose what to buy.

Journalists change their minds about their
However, journalists themselves are becoming more concerned. The preliminary results from a survey sponsored by the National Council for the Training of Journalists into journalists at work show significant changes in attitude among working journalists compared to a similar survey 10 years ago.

This shows that although UK journalists are highly qualified (88% have a degree or higher qualification against 38% in the UK workforce as a whole) less than two-thirds (63%) have a journalism qualification.

Journalism qualifications are seen as increasingly important in getting work as a journalist (80% up from 72% a decade ago) and increasingly relevant to their work as a journalist (89%, up from 82% in 2002).

Although the majority have undertaken some learning in the previous 12 months (71%) most of this has been informal and self-taught, more likely to be paid for by the individual or free than paid for by an employer.

All those surveyed felt that changes in the last 10 years have led to lower job satisfaction, feeling the job has been deskilled (40%) and they produce a lower quality of work (38%). Only half would recommend a young person to become a journalist – 48% would not.

This is a damning verdict from those currently working in British newsrooms. Trust in journalists is at a 10-year low, and journalists themselves are more pessimistic about the profession than they were a decade ago.

The increasing casualisation of journalism – fewer staff jobs and greater use of freelances – is further undermining standards in the "trade" in ways that practitioners are recognising. A separate study for the NCTJ conducted among senior editors from almost all the media groups revealed a shared concern that the Leveson revelations had "dented their own personal integrity and that of their profession as a whole."A 'big danger' from the 'chattering classes'

Others feared the report would lead to the suppression of good journalism and that important stories would go unreported. As one interviewee put it: "There is a big danger that the chattering classes will seek to impose their own values on this process and that they will seek to eliminate what they see as 'tawdry', labelling it as unethical."

Over the last decade, criticism of poor journalism has come not just from the "chattering classes" outside journalism but from within its ranks as well. Nick Davies, in his 2009 book Flat Earth News was a damning indictment of British journalism, with too much unfiltered PR or "churnalism".

Malcolm Dean, in his book Democracy Under Attack, outlines seven deadly media sins: distortion, group think, being too adversarial, dumbing down, too readily duped, emphasising politics over policy and, of course, relentless negativity.

Before them, John Lloyd's book, What the Media are Doing to our Politics, set out a similarly critical and polemical account of a cynical media prioritising impact over the public interest in its coverage of politics.

But the newspaper industry is stubbornly dug in against reform. Rather as the pro-gun lobby in the US uses the constitution's second amendment to block even a modest level of reform, the UK newspaper industry finds it hard to conceive of any significant change that might not undermine its freedom and independence.

This is expressed in a refusal to countenance any statutory underpinning to press regulation, but extends further into refusal to seriously consider a firm commitment to qualifications, standards, public accountability or training.

It gives the appearance of an industry in denial – about the parlous state it has reached in terms of public trust and morale, and about the responsibilities the public require to accompany its influence. The press, swift to call others to account, seem unprepared to meet the same external standards they demand of other sectors. In all the debate about regulatory frameworks, there has been little discussion about changing cultural attitudes which may not be serving the industry well.

Media today inculcates all aspects of our lives. We are bombarded with messages every day; newsrooms have to serve the real time demands of the internet in a vastly more competitive environment. News cycles are now measured in minutes, not even hours, let alone days.

The technology of news-gathering and production is increasingly sophisticated. The impact of the media on public debate and policy is substantial; political and corporate press officers now outnumber the staffs of major newsrooms. Is this any environment for even a gifted amateur or tradesman?

Journalists not professionals in 'objective sense' Clearly it is true that journalists are not professionals in any objective sense. They do not stand comparison with true professions such as medicine or the law. Journalists, although more highly qualified than most of the country, do not require a formal education in their craft, and should not require a licence to practise.

There have of course been attempts to establish the press card as a badge of legitimacy – most recently by some within the industry proposing a new form of self-regulation. But the need for independence has prevailed. Nor do journalists adhere to any universal or enforceable code of conduct. The PCC had a good editors' code of practice but, as Leveson revealed, it was not adhered to and the PCC was unable to enforce it in any meaningful way.

Individual organisations may write and enforce their own codes or value statements but, as yet, there's no universally accepted set of professional values backed up by a governing body with the power to censure journalists who deviate from the code.

The only reason for journalism not to become a profession is the fundamental question of independence. Externally set standards and accountabilities, especially if set in statute, are clearly unacceptable to the industry – and it's a view shared by many politicians and large sections of the public who recognise the importance of "non-interference."

So could any framework of a profession be put in place without statute or externally imposed standards and would there be value in doing so?

Would formalising journalism education make individual journalists or editors more effective? How would creating a professional pool of consistently trained journalists affect the entrepreneurial flair that drives editorial success?

Can a new editors' code establish a set of common standards that would be enforceable? Can employers be persuaded to support career-long development of their staff?

Source: guardian