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Maximising the production of knot-free (clear) wood can be achieved by early removal of branches from the lower crown. Ideally, this is carried out without reducing stem growth or the competitive status of the pruned tree. The decision surrounding the time to prune in Eucalyptus species is influenced by stem- and branch-diameter development, the rate of branch senescence and ejection on the lower stem, the timing of canopy closure and the proportion of leaf area that can be removed before growth is reduced. In this study, the effect of site quality on stem, branch and crown development was examined in 1.5- to 6.5-y-old Eucalyptus pilularis Sm. and E. cloeziana F.Muell. trees from plantations across north-eastern New South Wales, Australia. Results from 27 plantations established on former pastures showed that site quality influenced height, diameter growth, and live-crown rise in both species, but it influenced maximum branch diameter in E. cloeziana only. Using regression relationships and threshold valu...

Pruning of live branches is a management option to enhance wood quality in plantation trees. It may also alter whole-tree water use, but little is known about the extent and duration of changes in transpiration. In this study, sap flow sensors were used to measure transpiration for 14 days prior to, and 75 days following the removal, through pruning, of the lower 50% of the live-crown length of 10–11 m tall four-year old Eucalyptus pilularis Sm. and E. cloeziana F. Muell. trees. Pruning had no effect on stem growth, sapwood water content or radial pattern of sap velocity in either species. Pruning reduced mean daily water use by 39% in E. pilularis and 59% in E. cloeziana during the first eight days after pruning. Thirty six days after pruning there were no longer any significant differences in transpiration rates between pruned and unpruned trees in either species. Our results show that pruning of live branches had only a short-term effect on whole-tree transpiration in these sub-tropical eucalypt species.

At the AEJMC convention in Chicago in August, I was at one of the gastronomically disastrous social events sponsored by a university or two when a tenured associate professor from one of the fastest growing and most improved U.S. journalism schools told me that now that everyone has a camera in his or her telephone, and stationery video cameras also seem ubiquitous, there is, or soon will be, little need for U.S. journalists.I double-checked to make sure that I had heard what I thought I had heard, and then promptly issued my blunt rebuke.This would have been just a passing moment, but I'm afraid that if one U.S. journalism/mass communication professor thinks that way, the chances that he is the only one are quite slim. And if he is not the only one, I hope that this will not be a trend, or as the case may be, stating such a position after obviously have done no thinking.Near the end of the movie Absence of Malice, Megan (Sally Field), the disgraced former newspaper reporter, says to Gallagher (Paul Newman), the former liquor wholesaler who had the misfortune to know too many mobsters, "I know you think what I do for a living is nothing. But it really isn't nothing. I just did it badly." This represents, I think, one of the central dilemmas facing U.S. journalism professors: students increasingly think, and are often told by pundits, politicians, and others, that journalists don't really do anything at all, or at least not anything that an average person can't do. And it has become increasingly difficult for journalism professors to point their students to examples of daily journalism that is practiced the way that it should be: Remind your print students that leads should be thirty-five words or fewer, and that morning's New York Times has numerous leads that run fifty or sixty words. Explain to your students how and why news stories should have multiple sources, then turn on any TV news show or again turn to the New York Times and find numerous one-source stories (and others with only one named source).But as licensing boards maintain the highest standards for physicians, whether or not they are always practiced every day by every physician, and state supreme courts or bar associations (varying by state) maintain the standards for both knowledge and ethics for lawyers, so must journalism professors-in the proper absence of such government or quasi-government hurdles-maintain the standards, be the gatekeepers, the theorists, and the critics, of what journalism should (must?) be and not accept the lowest common denominator of who has a phone camera at a car wreck, or who watched the city council meeting on cable TV through the wonders of the municipal government's one fixed camera.Fortunately for all of us, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote their Elements of Journalism (in an expanded/updated edition since 2007) in an organic way: by discussing best practices of U.S. journalism with hundreds of U.S. journalists. In other words, their book represents best practices by practitioners, not only a random professor/ textbook author's personal preferences, and therefore represents what at least some of the best U.S. journalists do, or at least try to do. And if you haven't read Elements of Journalism, it might be a revelation. I hope that if you teach print, online, broadcast, and/or photojournalism, you will realize that it can be the journalism bible that it became for me and many of my students: a companion for all of those reporting/ writing textbooks that seem to assume that everyone knows what journalism is, and why it is important-and, thus, that all the reporting/writing textbook needs to do is to tell students how to do it. (Memo to textbook authors: do not assume anything!)The first three chapters of Kovach and Rosenstiel are as excellent as any other, but for the purposes of distinguishing exactly how journalism is most obviously different from an amateur taking a camera phone photo, or writing a blog posting after watching the city council meeting on television, the key points start in chapter 4 and continue through the book's remainder. …

I first experienced the unreflective entitlement of so many sports journalists when, in the late 1970s, I worked on the student newspaper at Crescent Valley High School (Corvallis, Oregon). Our tabloid was published every two or three weeks and sections were divided into news, features, opinion, and sports. Sports would be allotted 20 to 25 percent of the pages, perhaps sometimes more, but it was said to be never enough. Not only was the sports editor the only section editor to complain, he regularly threw tantrums.It wasn't as if there wasn't anything else but sports going on. Drawing from almost all higher-income neighborhoods in a university town, probably 75 percent of graduates at least started college, and the high school had a full complement of student clubs, theater and music productions, advanced placement courses, and so on. Two members of my high school class were Chris Botti, the internationally known jazz trumpeter who already was starting his career, and Dave Johnson, who won the Olympic bronze medal in decathlon (Barcelona, 1992).And while my school's principal then was a former Oregon State basketball player, and one of two vice-principals had played football, basketball, and baseball for OSU, the other vice-principal was a nerdy former debater. The school's wrestling coach was also a serious U.S. and Russian history teacher who often advised people to read Sports in America, by James Michener (1976), a scathing indictment of U.S. athletics, especially from a novelist who claimed that sports had saved him from prison.As I went through my journalism career, sports journalism played a minor but memorable role. On the Oregon Daily Emerald staff(University of Oregon), the sportswriters did a good job, didn't cause any problems, but always seemed mostly like they were primarily having a good time. (The more serious-acting journalists on stafflater covered political, national, and international news for USA Today, Seattle Times, Portland Oregonian, Detroit News, and other major dailies.) Editing suburban community newspapers in Tacoma, Washington, I had another entitled sports editor who occasionally threw a tantrum over what he thought was not enough space. Again, no other staffer ever did that, and it wasn't because everyone else, or anyone else, had enough space in a tabloid weekly. From there I went to international trade and hobby publications owned by Capital Cities/ABC, a daily business and law newspaper, and two urban alternative newsweeklies, and there was no sports news in any of them. Then I finished another master's degree and a PhD and became a professor.Let's just say that it was different from what I expected or hoped when it came to students' interests. At University of Georgia (where I taught starting in 1996 as a doctoral student), Missouri State University, and Point Park University, very different institutions in very different places, certain patterns emerged. The number of students in print journalism courses who even professed to be interested in journalism was often the minority; public relations, "undecided," generic "mass communication," and other students were in news writing or feature writing or magazine writing courses only because this or that course was in the department's core, or their major's core, or was an elective toward a major in something other than print journalism. It became fairly obvious that most students wouldn't have been taking media law or media ethics unless those courses were required, and almost no one signed up for the helpful and/or highly relevant courses that weren't, such as media management or media history. Most students planning to go into print journalism weren't reading any newspaper and usually only the fluffiest of magazines, and most broadcast journalism students weren't watching the TV newscasts that included their possible future colleagues and/or competitors. Worse, at least to me, I quickly learned that of students seriously planning to go into journalism (print, broadcast, and/or online), a far disproportionate number of them focused on sports journalism, including-it seemed-nearly all male journalism students. …

In the summer 2009 issue, I wrote about a proposed new media-heavy curriculum and called it "how one would really blow up a J-school curriculum." I know anecdotally that at least a few JMC programs around the United States compared and contrasted the new media skills they were teaching or were planning to teach with the ideal/idealistic curriculum that I wrote about here (but which I did not design).I'm back on the topic, but sharing with you an innovative curriculum that was designed from scratch, and already is in place - in a bilingual School of Communication in Spain, specifically at IE University, the university that has grown up from IE Business School (one of the five best in Europe and thus highly ranked worldwide) and was launched in autumn 2008.IE Business School itself is not only private, but privately owned; it was founded by Diego del Alcazar (Tenth Marquis of la Romana), who in September 2007 was appointed chairman of Spain's largest media conglomerate, Vocento, which owns the ABC national newspaper, regional newspapers, online media, television, and radio operations. Despite the marquis's substantial wealth, the launching of IE University from IE Business School was still a huge risk and a huge investment for its owners - meaning that they had to do an awful lot right in terms of curriculum, hiring faculty, and marketing the university to potential students throughout Europe and the United States. And this was against a backdrop of the so-called Bologna Accords ( 1 999) to more or less standardize European higher education by 2010.Dr. Samuel Martin -Barbero, an IE Business School professor specializing in corporate communications, was appointed dean, and he and others (including significant advice from Penn's Annenberg School for Communication) conducted a comprehensive analysis of what other universities were doing and not doing, what was feasible, necessary, and ideal. Eight of the "nine provocative ideas for change" (my paraphrasing here) were: fulfilling minimum local, national, and European recommendations is not enough to maximize quality; accreditation requirements are inadequate if they do not result in study abroad and fluency in a second language; all communication subdisciplines must obtain enough resources to pursue teaching excellence; "ironclad" defense of senior faculty and long-time courses is counterproductive when major change is needed; it is necessary to implement policies and strategies to achieve excellence in faculty, students, and curriculum, collect empirical evidence ofthat excellence, and work toward employers recognizing such excellence with appropriate salaries; "it is inappropriate to negotiate internship agreements, many of them unpaid positions, without first being able to influence the conditions and characteristics of the permanent positions and freelance opportunities offered by those same companies"; "expanding] multimedia infrastructures and resources" should be dependent upon attempts to "optimize, recycle, renew or eliminate existing" media; a university should not obtain additional research funding unless faculty are finishing and publishing their studies, and also working with industry experts and international peers; and communication scholars should have an "entrepreneurial spirit in the evolution of the area of communication knowledge."The ninth idea, which Martin-Barbero listed fourth, said in full:It is fruitless to continue a policy of hyperactive marketing of an ever-burgeoning portfolio of degrees with the objective of attracting more students, while remaining ignorant of the reality of the demand in the labour market and what the competition is doing, as well as when there is a transfer of recruitment and external prescriptor/advisor commitments to the faculty body itself.This list of nine "provocative ideas" led to nine recommendations/proposals for a new School of Communication at IE University. They were that the school had to execute:* "new concepts and actions such as 'internationalization,' 'excellence,' "entrepreneurship,' 'competitiveness,' 'recruitment and retention of talent,' the figure of 'mentor,' 'professional opportunities,' and 'bonuses. …

No one doubts that the Poynter Institute is eminently qualified to be designing online journalism courses, if anyone is. Indeed, some discussion about Poynter's NewsU programs has been along the lines of why a university would NOT want to partner with Poynter Institute when its faculty generally are more professionally qualified than many adjuncts are and might have journalistic credentials outshining anyone's in most JMC programs' full-time faculty. Poynter's faculty includes four administrators who have taught; fifteen regular faculty; five adjunct faculty; six affiliate faculty; ten "fellows and other professionals" (including persons such as Missouri journalism professor Jacqui Banaszynski); and various visiting faculty members at any given point. The Board of Trustees and National Advisory Board also include a few current or former j-school deans and professors. The experienced Poynter Institute has developed more than seventy self-directed journalism education modules, the most popular of which, in order, are: "Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More"; "The Be a Reporter Game"; "The Interview"; "The Lead Lab"; "News Sense: The Building Blocks of News"; "Language of the Image"; "The Writer's Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use"; "Get Me Rewrite: The Craft of Revision"; "Five Steps to Multimedia Storytelling"; and "Math for Journalists: Help with Numbers." (Fortunately, "Typography for News Design" is the fourteenth-most-popular module, so perhaps Americans will finally see fewer ugly publications and websites!) Second, online education is something of a big question mark in terms of effectiveness. For every study that says that online education is as effective, or more effective, than in-classroom delivery, there's another one that says otherwise. Let's for the moment assume that either the evidence is inconclusive, or at least that online courses' effectiveness vary by course type, course level, subject matter, and/or design of specific instances of in-classroom and online versions. (Poynter brags that, across seventeen quarterly evaluations, 61% of users "said modules were helpful to extremely helpful in getting better on the job/in class," while "72% said they would recommend NewsU to colleague." I don't know about you, but I don't find that 61% figure to be very impressive about a free, self-directed program, and while 82% of users said "they are likely to take another module," only 47% actually have taken two or more.) Third, in case you missed the AEJMC convention session (August 11, 2011) by Howard Finberg, Poynter Institute; Mark Biggs, Missouri State University; Susan Reilly, Florida Atlantic University; and Tony Fellow, California State UniversityFullerton, allow me to summarize it and thus what JlOl is all about. Finberg has said that the "background" in launching JlOl was "leverage self-directed modules" while adding online group seminars and a "Webinar" experience; to work with journalism schools; and execute JlOl keeping in mind that it "intersects with [the "interests" of the] Carnegie Corp.," which gave the Poynter Institute a "pilot program" grant to fund JlOl with a few schools. Finberg also stated three JlOl goals: "unique educational experience" via "leveraging the expertise of Poynter, closer relationships with universities, [and] building upon our successful e-learning modules"; "work more closely with universities," and "create lifelong learners," including to "increase the understanding of the role of journalism" "no matter what students choose as their profession." Hence, Poynter is savily working on the correct assumption that not all JMC majors pursue a career in the JMC professions/industries, let alone journalism itself, and is implying that JlOl-like courses may play a role in a larger media literacy mission for universities. The standard syllabus as outlined by Finberg consists of Week 1: Introduction; Week 2: What is News?; Week 3: Intro to Reporting; Week 4: Interviewing; Week 5: Story Forms & Shapes; Week 6: Alternative Story Forms; Week 7: Dealing with Diversity; Week 8: Reporting & Writing; Week 9: Introduction to Style; Week 10: Rewriting Yourself; Week 11: Libel, Slander, Privacy; Week 12: News-Gathering Legality (though for CaI State-Fullerton, Week 12 was devoted to "Press Releases Info," presumably because students were getting media law in another course, perhaps simultaneously); Week 13: Ethical Decision Making: Week 14: Multimedia Storytelling; Week 15: Business of Journalism; and Week 16: Wrap Up/What's Next. …

Make no mistake about it. In the continuing outpour of books about America's beleaguered higher education industry, the biggest recent bombshell among them all is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa: these two sociology professors published a guest op-ed piece in the May 15, 2011, Sunday New York Times, a full four months after their book was released officially on January 15. And certainly in the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in a population that stretches to have a twenty-four-minute attention span, four months is an eternity. Academically Adrift is, without doubt, a withering read, a little death by a thousand cuts, and one that the fairly extensive news media coverage cannot Eind has not done justice to. Thus, one mostly overlooked aspect of the book is that one academic major (or expected major) that the 2,362 participating students (at twenty-four four-year colleges/universities) could report was "communications." (Surveyed students saw it defined as "speech, journalism, television/radio, etc.") It was one of several "broad categories" on a list that included "business, education/social work, engineering/computer science, health, social science/humanities, science/mathematics, and other" ("communications" omitted here). (That U.S. news media do such a lousy job of covering both their own industry, their own professions, and their own educations is a separate topic that I have addressed previously at length elsewhere.) Arum and Roksa, working with the Council for Aid to Education and the Social Science Research Council, were able to gather demographic data; scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) at the beginning of the freshmen year and spring of the sophomore year; and students' reports related to "college climate," "time use," "college location/context," "college financing," and "academic preparation." Arum and Roksa's data analysis was highly sophisticated, and I could not here adequately summarize their various controls, multiple regressions, etc. (Their appendix of methodology, data tables, and the student questionnaire require sixty-eight pages of their 270-page volume.) So let's cut to the chase. Students (who were broken down into "concentrator" students and "non-concentrator," with concentrators being students who had taken at least one standard deviation above the mean percentage of courses taken in a subject) were asked how many times they met with faculty outside of class during the previous semester. Among concentrators: science/math: 4.03; engineering/computer: 3.74; social sciences/humanities: 3.71; education/social work: 3.35; business: 3.34; communications: 3.2; and health: 2.9. These numbers are not per-course, but overall, so communications students are meeting with professors less than once a month, ranging from the same professor each time and not meeting with other instructors at all, to meeting 3+ instructors only once each during a semester. Arum and Roksa note that the less often students meet outside class with instructors, the more they are "potentially at elevated risk of limited academic achievement and noncompletion" (p. 64). Students were asked how many hours a week they spent studying; among concentrating students, it was science/mathematics: 14.7; health: 13.17; engineering/computer: 12.69; social sciences/humanities: 12.44; education/social work: 10.64; communications: 10.51; and business: 9.55. (Disclaimer: not all results were statistical- Iy significant.) As Arum and Roksa comment, "...alarming, 37 percent of students reported spending less than five hours per week preparing for their courses. The limited number of hours students spend studying is consistent with the emergence of a college student culture focused on social life and strategic management of work requirements....Academic 'success' was achieved through 'controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload. …

In this issue, two British scholars present a study, part of which is about how and whether U.K. journalism students associate journalistic work with entrepreneurship. They, and others in the United Kingdom, have been thinking, and acting, for several years on the notion that journalism careers going forward will consist of regularly, frequently, or always working on a temporary and/or part-time basis - what we used to call freelancing, but what is now increasingly referred to as entrepreneurial journalism. (Those interested in relevant, previously published research might want to consult Astrid Gynnild's May 2005 article in NORDICOM Review, titled, "Winner Takes It All: Freelance Journalism on the Global Communication Market"; Kathleen M. Ryan's October 2009 article in Journalism, "The Performative Journalist"; and, most relevantly, "An Education for Independence," by David Baines and Ciara Kennedy, in the February 2010 issue oi Journalism Practice.) What probably most journalism professors in the United States and surely nearly all others around the world don't know is that in July 2010, the Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York (CUNY) announced that it was going to launch an "Entrepreneurial Journalism" program, and then in winter 2011, it started the new program. Back in July, CUNY journalism Dean Stephen B. Shepard announced, in part: Working with our faculty, we plan to design and launch a program in entrepreneurial journalism - providing students with the education and research tools needed to build a sustainable future for journalism. The proposed program would add a fourth semester for select students - with new courses, workshops, research, and apprenticeships - earning graduates, upon approval of the New York State Education Department, an M.A. degree in Entrepreneurial Journalism. For example, students might take courses in emerging business models for news, new technologies for journalism, hyperlocal ventures, management of new media, or advanced uses of social media. They might develop new products in a course on entrepreneurial journalism. Or work in local neighborhoods to help people report on their own communities. Training our own students is just the beginning. We need research to find the economic models that will replace the financial underpinnings that no longer work, and new products to reach new audiences in new ways. So we will expand beyond our pioneering work last year for the Knight Foundation that examined innovative financing models for local news. We will create a more ambitious incubator to provide seed money and investment for promising new journalistic ideas. All these efforts build on work we've already started. From the get-go, Professor Jeff Jarvis, who heads our interactive program, has been teaching an entrepreneurial course in which students develop a journalistic product or service, including a basic business plan. Their efforts are judged by a jury of venture capitalists, media executives, and editors. The jury awards seed money, supplied so far by the McCormick Foundation, to the best ideas. The result: We now have seven recent graduates incubating their ideas at the J-School. Another pioneering project: a hyperlocal news site ..... In mid-February, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism was announcing what it had put together in the meantime and had launched, saying in part: The School opened the courses to 11 students, alumni, and mid-career professionals who want to become involved in the developing field of entrepreneurial journalism. The classes include three CUNY J-School alumni along with postgraduate students from New York, Denmark, Cameroon, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. More than 60 people sought admittance to the courses. Creation of the five courses was among the first tasks of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, established last fall with $6 million from The Tow Foundation and the John S. …

Genetic parameters, including heritabilities, trait-trait correlations and across-site correlations for growth traits and quambalaria shoot blight damage were estimated in four Corymbia citriodora subsp. variegata clonal trials in northern New South Wales, Australia. Additive and non-additive variances were calculated separately to allow the estimation of broad- and narrow-sense heritabilities. Quambalaria shoot blight damage at ages 1 and 3.5 y was under predominantly non-additive genetic control (H2 = 0.02-0.46, h2 = 0-0.17). Growth traits at age 5 y were under moderate genetic control (H2 = 0.32-0.54, h2 = 0-0.54). Growth traits were strongly correlated with quambalaria shoot blight damage. Across-site correlations were low for quambalaria shoot blight damage (rg = 0.13-1.00) but high (> 0.8) for the growth traits. Index selection was used to determine the most efficient selection strategies for improvement of growth and disease tolerance.

Back in 1999, twenty-nine education ministers from European countries signed the Bologna Declaration, which launched the European Higher Education Area and ongoing meetings and agreements lumped under the heading of Bologna Process or Bologna Accords. The goal was to standardize academic standards (and measurement of them) throughout Europe. The Process now includes forty-seven countries. As one might guess, it doesn't seem like the Process has gone any more smoothly than the European Union generally, for many reasons: differing philosophies of higher education, differing histories of higher education, differing funding for higher education, national pride, language differences, and more. Journalism/media education, however, should have, and has, been one area in which significant progress has been made. This is despite major differences, which include but are not limited to, many experienced professionals teaching mass communication subjects in a country such as the United Kingdom while journalism courses in countries such as Romania are largely taught by persons with no professional media experience but doctoral degrees in just about every field of the social sciences and humanities except mass communication. Along the way, various international journalism degree and/or research programs have sprung up. For example, the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Journalism and Media program calls for graduate students to spend their first year at the Danish School of Journalism at the University of Aarhus, then spend their second year at either the University of Amsterdam, University of Hamburg, City University London, or Swansea University. The program's students may also arrange study at the University of California-Berkeley, Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile (Santiago), or the University of Technology (Sydney). Another example: The European Journalism Observatory started in 2004, facilitates research about "journalism cultures" in Europe and the United States through a partnership between the Universita della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano), Erich Brost Institut at Technical University Dortmund, the University of Wroclaw, the Methenhaus Wien (Vienna), and the Turiba Business School (Latvia). The attempt at standardizing European curricula and its assessment (I use this word for U.S. readers, but it is not used in Europe) is called "harmonization" and "tuning," both pleasant, diplomatic words that suggest that only tinkering, not major changes, are taking place. In fact, both are, resulting in concerns that what is unique and/or cutting edge in one institution or even an entire country might be lost in the movement toward standardization; for example, will corporate communications education survive in Spain (where "public relations" refers to hosts and greeters in bars and clubs)? Numerous surveys and other studies have been done over the years in Europe to compare and contrast journalism/media curricula, faculty, students, and industry/ professional needs and preferences. (Of course many U.S. studies comparing and contrasting what employers want and need with: what students think employers want/need, or what JMC professors think employers want/need, or what JMC curricula is offering to students in light of industry/professions want/need, also have been completed, a substantial number of them published in this journal.) But what is unusual, at least by U.S. standards, is a two-part (so far) European study asking students both what they think is important in their education and what their institutions are doing well (or not doing so well) and comparing/contrasting that with what employers are saying and what is in various institutions' curriculum. You might have your own interpretation, but what I gather is that what students want may vary from institution to institution (the students of each institution, perhaps even from major-to-major, have different cultures) as well as from country-to-country, and that students often contradict themselves, whether or not they are ill-informed on relevant industry/professional facts and/or about what higher education is, can do, and should do. …

Every conference of communication academics this summer (and, granted, for the last several years) has been abuzz with papers and panel discussions more or less asking the same questions explicitly: What is journalism now? What is mass communication now or does it even still exist? and What should journalism education consist of now? The implicit question, the one not asked outloud, is whether journalism education still matters. I don't know about you, but all of this is getting rather tedious and largely counterproductive, whether it is coming from an editor-turned-academic who thinks his long-time profession/industry is drying up before his eyes, or whether it is coming from a hardcore academic who wants to "problematize" everything and insist that there are no answers right now about anything, only questions. To me, much of this is hysteria reminiscent of all previous periods of technological innovation in communication. Many communication professors seem to need reminding right now, if they ever learned it at all in academic programs that have minimized or eliminated media history from their curricula, that the "legitimate" theaters mostly thought that movies were going to bankrupt them even more than usual. Surely Western Union's telegraph business thought it was going to be killed by the telephone (Western Union survived that) and the Internet (maybe it was, but the last telegram wasn't sent until February 2006). The radio industry mostly thought that television was going to put it out of business. Broadcast television thought that cable TV was going to put it out of business; broadcasters have even fought Federal Communications Commission regulations, to use only one possible example, as if American viewers choose TV shows to watch based on how many indecent words they can hear per hour. Broadcast and cable TV have both been nervous about the Internet. And, of course, the newspaper industry generally has thought that radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and the Internet, each and all, were going to put it out of business. (The magazine industry apparently has mostly flown under the radar, neither another medium's target nor insecure about its own value and quality.) I don't know whether bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the United States Post Office (now Postal Service) thought they were going to be put out of business by first the telegraph and then the telephone. Other than parcels and periodicals, it certainly would not have been a ridiculous thought. But the Postal Service seems to have done rather nicely until relatively recently hit by the critical mass combining fax, e-mail, overnight mail, cell phones, and years of slow U.S. economic growth followed by the Great Recession. (Memo to junk-mailers: You may still send letters to people who you can't call because of "Do Not Call lists." That should help.) The case of the newspaper industry is particularly instructive (and painful) with regard to Chicken Little reactions. The general pattern is that many U.S. newspaper employees have been especially willing, even eager, to be fatalistic about their employers, their profession, and their entire industry, each time a new communication technology comes along. (Oswald Garrison Villard wrote the book, The Disappearing Daily: Chapters in American Newspaper Evolution.... in 1944. Carl E. Lindstrom wrote the book, The Fading American Newspaper.... in 1964!) But, voila, the U.S. newspaper industry survives it. And then another communication technology (such as the Internet) comes along, and those newspaper employees who don't remember Chicken Little's last appearance prepare for the fryer again while those who do remember murmur, "This time is different." (There's a recent book on that: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and Sean Pratt; someone could/should write This Time Is Different: Eight Decades of Newspaper Journalists' Folly.) But the facts are not just that the U. …

The "constructed audience" is a term used, and a concept researched, by mass communication scholars to mean, essentially, whom media content is aimed at based on its content, both the subject matter and the nature. For example, the Flesch Reading Ease scale, developed in the 1940s, finds today that Associated Press copy and many elite U.S. newspapers and magazines are all written at a level requiring, on average, a year or two of college to read. Assuming that this reading level, which is controlled by writing style (sentence length, vocabulary size, etc.), is essentially intentional, then one can say that the writers have constructed an audience who not only is interested in reading about the subjects that the articles are about, but who have completed a year or two of college. Certainly, both easier and more difficult reading levels are being avoided, and, based on the consistency of this practice and the fact that many journalists are capable of writing at a higher level, suggest that it is intentional, not an accident or coincidence. Many published and unpublished studies have been done about journalism textbooks. Most recently, Timothy P. Vos presented a paper, "Journalism by the Book: The Epistemological Significance of News Forms," at the 2008 International Communication Association convention. In 2006, Marie Hardin, Julie E. Dodd, and Kimberly Lauffer published, "Passing It On: The Reinforcement of Male Hegemony in Sports Journalism Textbooks," in Mass Communication S- Society, and in 2005, Jon Bekken published, "The invisible enemy: Representing labour in a corporate media order," in Javnost-The Public. In 2001, Hardin and Ann Preston published, "Inclusion of Disability Issues in News Reporting Textbooks," in this journal, and Joseph A. Mirando published, "Embracing Objectivity Early On: Journalism Textbooks of the 1800s," in Journal of Mass Media Ethics. Mirando also published in JMMEm 1998, "Lessons on ethics in news reporting textbooks, 1867-1997." In 2000, Bonnie S. Brennen published, "What the hacks say: The ideological prism of U.S. journalism textbooks," in Journalism. In this journal, Jane S. McConnell in 1999 published, "American journalism textbooks and social responsibility," and Katherine E. Rowan in 1990 published a teaching tips article, "New examples improve understanding of story types," which suggested that students be given stories to identify and analyze based on models in textbooks. Not just print journalism textbooks have been studied. In 2003, in this journal, Catherine Winter published, "Learning to Do What Comes Naturally: Delivery Instruction in Broadcast News Textbooks." In 2007, Peggy Hoy, Oliver Raaz, and Stefan Wehmeier published, "From facts to stories or from stories to facts? Analyzing public relations history in public relations textbooks," in Public Relations Review, and in 2006, Brigitta Brunner published in Public Relations Quarterly, "Where are the Women? A Content Analysis of Introductory Public Relations Textbooks." In this journal, Lois A. Boynton and Cassandra Imfeld published in 2004, "Virtual Issues in Traditional Texts: How Introductory Public Relations Textbooks Address Internet Technology Issues"; Stanley L. Harrison in 1990 published, "Ethics and moral issues in public relations curricula"; and Pamela J, Creedon in 1989 published, "Public relations history misses 'her story.'" Marilyn Kern-Foxworth published in the Howard Journal of Communications, "Ethnic inclusiveness in public relations textbooks and reference books," in 1990, and in 1989, in this journal, "Public relations books fail to show women in context." In 1986, in Public Relations Review, Judy VanSlyke Turk and Debra L. Snedeker published, "Intro Public Relations Texts: A Round-up Review. " These examples and others indicate that journalism and mass communication as a discipline takes its own textbooks seriously enough to not only widely use them, but that the wide use means they should (and, obviously, can) be analyzed as artifacts of our teaching, our learning, the sociology of journalism, the culture of journalism education, the economics of textbook publishing, and more. …

Breeding for wood quality is limited by the long generation times and the delay before wood quality can be measured reliably. Association studies allow links between phenotype and genotype to be made, and are a prelude to accelerated domestication of trees by molecular breeding approaches. This study uses association genetics to identify DNA polymorphisms that correlate with solid wood properties of Eucalyptus pilularis Smith (blackbutt). We undertook extensive phenotyping of dimensional stability, growth and structural wood properties on a nine-year-old progeny trial established by Forests NSW at Hannam Vale, near Port Macquarie in NSW. A subset of 372 phenotyped individuals representing 284 families collected from 37 provenances was used as the association population for genotypic assessment. Fifty-two out of 127 novel DNA polymorphisms were surveyed within four candidate genes, CCR, CAD, MYB1 and MYB2. Several putative associations between wood quality traits and selected DNA polymorphisms are reported, along with the likely mechanism of action on wood quality. Association studies such as this will facilitate non-destructive DNA tests for heritable wood properties that can be used to enrich breeding populations at any developmental stage with desirable alleles.

Thirty years ago, Michael Ryan published his Journalism Monograph, "Journalism Education at the Master's Level," which attempted to answer three questions: "What are the criteria for admission to 77 master's degree programs in journalism and mass communication?"; "How are master's programs structured in schools of journalism and mass communication?"; and "What are the problems confronting faculties that administer master's programs in journalism and mass communication?" Ryan's answers to the latter question are no longer particularly relevant, and his answers to the second question have changed less than you probably think (including some ideas back then having been relatively recently implemented again as if they were original). The one that I am interested in here is the first one, on admissions criteria. Ryan mailed a survey to 78 graduate program directors whose programs met two criteria (membership in what is today the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication [ASJMC]) and having at least one graduate student in 1977, and he received 76 responses (Can one imagine 97+% participation today?). Because some universities had more tlian one relevant master's program and three had been discontinued or weren't related to journalism, Ryan ended up with 79 graduate program directors at 71 institutions. (Annual surveys by Dr. Lee Becker and his University of Georgia team now include about 200 institutions with master's degree programs, along with those without.) Ryan found that "Undergraduate grade point averages, letters of recommendation, Graduate Record Examinations scores and statements of goals are the four admissions requirements most often used by the 77 master's degree programs studied here. "Every graduate program requires a bachelor's degree in some field. Furthermore, 97 percent (75] based admissions decisions on undergraduate grade point averages. (Some publish specific minima; some do not.) Stempel (1972) reports that all 54 programs he studied based admissions in part on grade point averages. Two graduate programs apparently do not base admissions decisions on specific grade point averages. In some cases, this is not necessarily what the faculty wants. As Mark Popovich, Ball State's graduate coordinator, said, 'Our admission requirements are dictated by the graduate school, which only requires that students come with bachelor's [degree] in hand from an "accredited" college-university.' [quote marks, parentheses, and brackets in original except for raw datai "Letters of recommendation are required in 77 percent [60] of the programs. Stempel's 1971 figure was 63 percent. In 1971, GRE scores were the third most preferred criterion [59 programs] after overall GPA and journalism GPA. "Statements of goals are required in 75 percent [58] of these programs. Stempel's figure was 45 percent.... "The sharpest difference between these figures and Stempel's centers on professional experience as an admissions requirement. Only 1 percent [1] of the graduate programs examined here require professional experience of applicants, while 72 percent of the programs Stempel studied did. Perhaps the discrepancy can be explained by the fact that few respondents in Stempel's sample thought that professional experience was a very useful admissions criterion. (Only 2 percent of Stempel's respondents said they would use professional experience as a sole criterion, while 6 percent considered it the least useful criterion.)" [parentheses in original; raw data added] All of this was straightforward, although not as helpful for my purposes as it would have been if Ryan had gathered data on specific minimums in GPAs, GRE scores, and/or professional experience. But in the section of Ryan's study on "problems confronting faculty," "admissions" was ranked fourth of fourteen, and Ryan provided detail: "The success of any graduate program depends in large measure on the ability of the graduate program to establish fair admissions requirements that separate the strong students from the weak students. …

The primary question that seems to be on the minds of journalists and others who work in the newspaper industry, journalism professors, journalism students, and the general public is who is going to pay for journalists and journalism, if so much advertising is moved from newspapers (their print and online versions) to other Web sites, that newspaper companies are covering a lot less news or simply fold. Various ideas are floated: citizen journalism; endowed, nonprofit newspapers; nonprofit newsgathering organizations obtaining grants and/or subscriptions; employee ownership (ESOPs); newspapers charging micropayments for each current and/or archived article; etc. All of this assumes that financial resources are the only current and future issue, and many observers conclude that human resources are especially not a problem now: so many experienced journalists have been laid off and bought out that there are and will be plenty of experienced journalists available for continuing operations of current news organizations, plus whatever hiring they and new news organizations do. But this assumes, or at least implies, that the existing corps of journalists had no faults, no flaws, no shortcomings, and that the only issue is whether there is enough money to pay them. If only that were true. This moment's most obvious example is how well (or poorly) journalists covered the world of high (and low) finance to warn us, let alone prepare us, for the mortgage market meltdown, the stock market crash, and the resulting credit crisis. In American Journalism Review (December 2008/January 2009), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill business journalism professor Chris Roush published, "Unheeded Warnings: Well before this year's economic collapse, business journalists shined a spotlight on serious problems in the U.S. economy. But regulators and members of the public didn't pay much attention." Similarly, Martha M. Hamilton's article, "What We Learned In the Meltdown: Financial journalists saw some trees but not the forest. Now what?" in Columbia Journalism Review (December 2008/January 2009) is only slightly less defensive and laudatory than his. But of course finding those newspaper and magazine articles that over the last several years correctly warned politicians and the rest of us citizens/consumers about the impending crises and crashes is like finding a needle in a haystack. Moreover, many, if not most, articles Roush and Hamilton cite were vague or tentative, using phrases such as "might be overheated," "may be overvalued," "could be risky," etc. (The business journalists who didn't and couldn't see our current mess coming are the same type of journalist, if not the same persons, who didn't understand that no corporation [see Enron] with sound accounting and daily business principles can have a huge and continuously growing gap year after year between revenues and cash flow, because - at some point - a corporation must he able to "show us the money." At the very least, a corporation's cash flow must cover its expenses and dividends.) The U.S. news media did not exactly shine in the 2008 primary and general elections either, just the latest election cycle after which journalists no doubt will flagellate themselves, promise to do better in four years, and then not perform any better in 2012. I won't go into detail here about how newspaper and magazine journalism and journalists have fallen down on the job both generally and specifically in covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; functions throughout the federal government (take your choice, from the CIA to the FDA); science and technology; health and medicine; religion; education; and so on. In short, as I have said for many years, the dirty little secret about American journalists is not that they are biased, but that they are often not very competent. (For a fine documentation of this, see What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News [2004], by Eric Alterman, a man whose doctorate is in history, not mass communication! …

The loss of foliage through pruning of live branches may reduce tree growth or it may be compensated by photosynthetic up-regulation of the remaining crown. Here, the changes in light-saturated photosynthesis following pruning to remove 50% of green crown length were examined in 4-year-old Eucalyptus pilularis Sm. and Eucalyptus cloeziana F. Muell. trees. The objectives of the study were to: (1) compare leaf-level physiological (light-saturated photosynthesis (Amax), stomatal conductance (g), transpiration (T), dark respiration (Rd), quantum yield (Φ), light compensation point (Γ), water-use efficiency (WUE), nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE)) traits in species with contrasting crown dynamics and structure, (2) examine the effect of crown position on these traits, and (3) examine the effect of pruning on Amax, g, T, WUE, NUE, leaf N and P concentrations and specific leaf area (SLA). Prior to pruning there were no differences in Rd, Γ and Φ between E. pilularis and E. cloeziana but differences in Amax, T, g, leaf N, leaf P, WUE, NUE and SLA. Whereas the rate of physiological processes (Amax, T, and g) and leaf N and P concentrations increased with crown height, Rd, Γ, Φ and SLA declined along this vertical gradient, except in the upper crown of E. cloeziana where Amax, T and g were not different to the lower crown. No up-regulation of photosynthesis or changes in leaf physiology occurred between 6 and 13 months after pruning in either species. The results provide an important basis for modelling pruning effects in process-based tree growth models.

That's what a recent graduate of a Big 12 journalism school recently told me about graduates coming out of journalism programs these days-about their need to know about media management and economics. I think those of us who teach media management and/or media economics, and those of us who do not teach it but think they are important for students to know, have been somewhat remiss in not pressing our case. And, like my Big 12 alumnus friend, I think the need for young journalists to know about and understand it is more important than ever. Media economics are both allowing and forcing changes in media technologies, and media technologies are both allowing and forcing changes in media economics. And a major reason why traditional news media, entertainment media, and other media companies are threatened by new technologies is because of a great deal of bad management, especially but not only in the newspaper and broadcast television industries. Finally, if, how, and how well they are responding also is due to the quality of management. I don't know about enrollments in media management courses at many other universities, although from what I hear, others are in the same boat: when I teach Newspaper & Magazine Management at Point Park University, with its more than 550 undergraduate and graduate JM and sometimes have a passable grasp of ratings, shares, audited circulations, CPMs, and/or other quantitative information about mass communication, might realize that it is media management and media economics that will determine their fates, in addition to public needs and wants, professional standards and practices, and (at least with regard to all electronic media) government regulation or lack thereof. The most common reason I hear from print journalism students about why they don't take the course is that they don't think they will ever be in management, and some go so far as to say they don't want to be in management. (That today's young people claim to be nonmaterialistic might have something to do with this, but there are many reasons to work in management besides having a higher salary.) If I had the opportunity to talk to each student who could take my Newspaper & Magazine Management course but doesn't, my first point would be that many newspaper editors, newspaper publishers, magazine editors, and magazine publishers (not to mention people in middle management) also at some point-perhaps for a long time-said and thought the same thing. (We all know this is true in academia, too: think about how many department chairs and deans long thought they would never be there.) I would add that some of them won't know whether they like being in media management, or if they're any good at it, until after they have done it, but that is getting even more speculative than making an "odds are" prediction to a student about ending up in management. But let's take the student at her word: that she doesn't want to go into media management, and thinks the odds are slim that she'll ever be there in any case. Over the years, I've made a number of other arguments to print journalism students about why they should know something about media management and economics. …

Editor's Note As is so often the case, attending an international conference made me think a lot about the United States while listening to speakers talk about other countries. In this case, the conference was the Consultation Meeting on Capacity Building for Potential Centres of Excellence in Journalism Training in Africa, held March 16-18, 2008, at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. First, some background: In December 2005, journalism education experts meeting at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) decided to identify "centres of excellence" in African journalism education so that UNESCO would know which institutions to work with in developing ("capacity building") journalism education and journalism education in Africa. The UN Economic Commission for Africa in 2006 called for a "comprehensive audit of existing media training in Africa, identifying gaps, and development proposals to strengthen training." UNESCO contracted with Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies and France's Ecole superieure de journalism de Lille (ESJ) to set up "criteria and indicators and identifying potential centres of excellence in journalism training in Africa." Rhodes researched journalism programs in Portuguese- (Lusophone) and English-speaking (Anglophone) countries, while ESJ researched journalism programs in French-speaking (Francophone) countries and the Republic of South Africa. For the purposes of this study, African "journalism schools" were defined as journalism programs at universities and private colleges, and in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs.) Data were gathered on ninety-six programs in thirty-six of the fifty-four African countries, including sixty Anglophone, thirty Francophone, and six Lusophone. Researching the journalism schools was often difficult, due to many schools not having Web sites, schools not responding, e-mail addresses having changed, and more. The countries whose journalism schools the researchers had the most trouble contacting were in Algeria (one contacted, eleven not); Kenya (six contacted, seventeen not); Nigeria (twelve contacted, thirty-six not), and Tanzania (two contacted, eight not). Criteria that were eventually developed and agreed upon were: "A: Curriculum and institutional capacity"; "B: Professional and public service, external links and recognition"; and "C: Development plan, strategy and potential." Criterion A consisted of curriculum, teaching resources and equipment, and assessment systems, each of those points having their own operational definitions. Criterion B consisted of interaction and relations within the profession, international networking and recognition, social participation and standing, and other external orientations, again, each of those having their own detailed definitions. Criterion C consisted of strategy, budget and sustainability, management, and challenges. Researchers decided after their data collection (which included some on-site visits) and analysis that the seven "significant factors for differentiation between institutions" were/are: "breadth of media platforms covered by a school.... Formal mechanisms of interaction with the profession. Offer of entry-level education as well as continuing/in-service training to practicing professionals. Involvement of journalism and/or training networks and associations. Momentum of expansion/improvement over past three years. Sustainability: commitment of overall management of school activities and diversification of national and international partners. Systems in place for development of staff." Using the "significant factors for differentiation," the researchers identified twelve "centres of excellence" and nine "potential centres of reference" that might eventually be "centres of excellence." This latter group was identified by having "demonstrated" one or more of these "characteristics": "sustainability of the institution (in conditions of donor dependence or instability). …

The bananas are thought to be particularly sensitive to changes in the environment. This review considers some historical and recent investigations into the response of the leaf, root and reproductive system to the environment. Monteith's analysis of the response of plants to intercepted radiation is appropriate for analyzing the productivity of bananas and plantains. The banana is sensitive to soil water deficits, and expanding tissues such as emerging leaves and growing fruit are among the first to be affected. As soil begins to dry, stomata close and leaves remain highly hydrated, probably through root pressure. Productivity is affected because of the early closure of stomata. We find the common belief that bananas use large amounts of water does not have a strong physiological basis. Improvements in water-use efficiency in irrigated plantations could come from a closer match between plant water use and the amount of water applied. We examine recent data on water-use efficiency of different banana cultivars and propose that agronomists, physiologists and breeders could quantify the amount of water available in each rain-fed environment and work towards directing more of that water through the plant. The banana is day neutral for floral induction, but photoperiods of less than 12 h are associated with a slowing in the rate of bunch initiation that is independent of temperature expressed as growing degree days. This may contribute to seasonal variations in banana flowering, even in more tropical environments with moderate temperatures.

The effect of planting density on branch development was examined in 4-year-old Eucalyptus pilularis Sm. and Eucalyptus cloeziana F. Muell. plantations located near the coast of north-eastern NSW. Branch diameter, angle and status (live or dead) were measured along the entire stem of trees established at 1250, 1667 and 3333 stems per hectare (sph). Measurements of tree height and stem diameter at breast height over bark (DBH) were also recorded. Results showed that with an increase in initial planting density from 1250 to 1667 sph, branch size decreased, branch mortality on the lower stem increased, branch angle became more acute and DBH decreased in trees of both E. pilularis and E. cloeziana. A further increase in initial planting density from 1667 to 3333 sph did not significantly reduce branch size or branch angle but did result in increased branch mortality and decreased DBH in both species. These results suggest that increasing initial planting density from 1250 to 1667 sph will improve early branch control. However, there is no advantage in establishing trees at 3333 sph rather than 1667 sph to reduce branch size or increase branch mortality in either species. Clearwood production on the lower stem in all stocking treatments of both species was negligible at age 4.

As mentioned in my Summer 2007 Editor's Note, the Model Curricula for Journalism Education for Developing Countries & Emerging Democracies, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was unveiled in June at the World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) in Singapore. Almost two years in the making, it is a rather impressive 148-page document covering print and broadcast journalism education, for undergraduates (with three- and four-year university versions) and graduate students. (This curriculum does not cover public relations or advertising, or even photojournalism (which is merely mentioned], for that matter.) Scholars who managed this project were from Australia, Benin, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ghana, India, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States, while scholars from most of those countries and others wrote individual syllabi and/or reviewed various drafts. [Model Curricula reprints, on pages 35-38, the 2006 Tartu Declaration of the European Journalism Training Association, which I also reprinted in this space in the summer issue.) Model Curricula's introduction sets the tone, with its explicit references to democracy that were missing from the "Declaration of Principles of Journalism Education" drawn up by WJEC attendees, and the book's criticism that, "A weakness of much of journalism education arises out of a failure to grasp the degree to which education in university disciplines constitutes (with reporting and writing) the foundations of the practice of journalism." In case that isn't clear enough, Model Curricula, by page 9, is rejecting an education outside of journalism that is merely a "general background" and is instead essentially "propos[ing]" that journalism students in universities double major in journalism and another discipline "such as politics, economics, arts and culture, social issues, international relations, and natural and physical science and associated subjects such as the environment, health, and technology." While many of us in the United States routinely recommend a second major to print and broadcast journalism students, a much smaller percentage complete that second major, and the UNESCO document comes close to suggesting that such a plan be a requirement at universities where it is possible. A close reading of Model Curricula offers plenty else to think about. Among its "foundations of journalism" are a "basic understanding of evidence and research methods" and "knowledge of national and international political, economic, cultural, religious, and social institutions." Remember, these are standards being proposed for developing countries. Yet the book follows up on "evidence and research mediods" by specifying "Arithmetical skills and a basic knowledge of statistics and survey methods." Similarly, the senior-level science and health reporting syllabus, written by Nigeria's Idowu Sobowale, takes it for granted that such a course should include-among other topics-"the economic implications of well focused or haphazard healthcare delivery system....noise pollution....alternative sources of healthcare: medicinal herbs, leaves and roots; synergy between alternative and orthodox medicine; quality control....general agriculture....food science and technology....energy....mining....blood." Even among the relatively few science and/or health reporting courses being taught in the United States, how many of them are covering all of those topics? And could anyone seriously argue that such courses in developed countries shouldn't touch on them all (with the possible exception of the healthcare delivery system, as not all countries have one as "haphazard" as the United States')? Yet all I could think about are the various books, articles, and papers, by scholars both inside and outside journalism/mass communication, on how much science, social science, and just plain numbers (such as budget increases, or poll results) get mangled by U. …