This was an introduction to a book about newspapers, and describes different analytic strategies for newspapers in some detail

INTRODUCTION[1]

From Smith, A.C.H., Immirizi, E. & Blackwell, T. (1975) Paper Voices: The Popular Press

and Social Change 1935-1965, London: Chatto and Windus

The project had two main purposes: to examine how the popular press interprets social change to its readers; and to explore and develop methods of close analysis as a contribution to the general field of cultural studies.

Our starting-point was the assumption that at all times, but especially in periods of rapid social change, the press performs a significant role as a social educator. By its consistent reporting and comment about people and events, the press reflects changing patterns of life in a society. More significantly, by its selectivity, emphasis, treatment and presentation, the press interprets that process of social change. What interested us most was this active process of interpretation.

The dally newspaper is governed by the rhythm of day-to-day events. The paper must, appear fresh every day, giving dramatic coverage to urgent events. In this highly competitive field, the survival of a newspaper depends, to some degree, on its being first in the field with the 'fullest' possible coverage, with reports and comment which are later and newer than those contained in any of its rivals. Yesterday's news is stale, unless a new development has taken place, or a new angle can be found to give the item another lease of life. Even the best news stories have only a brief half-life in the daily press. The emphasis, then, is on immediacy, topicality, the dramatic, which give the daily newspaper its characteristic aspect of radical discontinuity. News stories break and disappear with indecent speed: one story is dropped between editions, or downgraded in importance, to give space to another.

But the air of immediacy is deceptive. Newspapers do not come absolutely fresh and open to news. They are already in a complex relationship with a body of regular readers. There is already in existence a strong, continuous practice which, by traditions and routines, defines what constitutes news, how to get it, how it should be presented, which is the hottest story. Individual items fit in with the longer preoccupations of a newspaper, and these preoccupations differ from one paper to another: a Guardian scoop is not necessarily the same as a scoop for the Mirror or the Express. As well as the immediate response to the news-gathering process, any newspaper must have a sense of the continuing areas of interest in the society it serves: a news item therefore takes its place and significance in an existing structure of awareness which frames events, changing at a slower pace than the sweep of events across the headlines suggests.

The crucial question, then, seemed to be this: when dealing with so complex a process as historical and social change, what already available stock of meanings was brought to bear by the newspaper so as to make that process intelligible to its readers? Are there core values in a newspaper which provide its staff and its readers with a coherent, if not consistent, scheme of interpretation? Do these core meanings change over time? And, if so, in response to what events?

Our first task was to select the papers for close study. We decided to take the 'popular' rather than the 'quality' press as the main focus. From this point of view, the Mirror and the Express virtually chose themselves. Ale time-scale for the project, from the Second World War to the mid-1960s, was the period in which these two papers established an unchallenged command over the daily newspaper reading public in terms of circulation. Within the field of mass circulation newspaper publishing, the Express and the Mirror provided us with striking contrasts, distinctive personalities and styles. They occupy opposed positions in the party-political spectrum. Each has a circulation spread through the social pyramid, though the Mirror has a massive readership in the CD categories which the Express does not match, and the Express has a spread throughout the class structure which no other daily newspaper commands. On political grounds alone, the Sketch might have seemed a more obvious match for the Mirror: but the gap between the two in terms of circulation was too wide. On the same grounds, neither the Herald, nor its successor, the Sun, nor the Mail, nor, before its decease, the News Chronicle could be considered a true match for the Express.

The time-scale for the project also presented us with few problems. Our project could not attempt a sustained chronological account of three decades; yet, for purposes of comparison, we wanted a period long and varied enough to enable us to test the response of the press to historical change in depth. The period from the war to the mid 1960s was a dramatic one in recent English social history - from slump and depression into the crisis of the war, to ‘affluence' in the '50s and the 'permissive society' of the '60s. In addition the period was punctuated by crucial mid-decade elections, in 1945, 1955 and 1964.

Since a close study of all live issues in that period was not possible, we had to choose lines of methodical enquiry, cuts into live material, which, though not exhaustive, were central enough to permit general conclusions to be drawn from them. The first was political, based on a selection of the newspapers from the middle years of each decade, focusing especially on the handling of politics under the pressure of a General Election. The intention was not simply to document the known political bias of each newspaper, but to try to get behind the overt political attitudes and reach underlying assumptions, in each newspaper, about the political process. What changes in popular political consciousness did each seem to assume in its readership? What were the changing ways in which newspapers spoke to their readers about politics? How did they seek to wield political influence?

Our second theme was more social in emphasis. It centred on the treatment in the press of changing ¹styles of life' in society at large. Here, we took as our starting point the familiar contrast between 'then' and 'now' with reference to the spread of 'affluence' in the post-war period. We knew that 'affluence' was a controversial subject-that it had provided for British society a convenient, perhaps too neat and compressed, image for a complex process of social change. At the same time, we found it convenient to take this image, to start with, at its face value. Using 'affluence' as our way of cutting into the material, then, what picture of social change in the period emerged from our study of the two newspapers? How did the press interpret and define social change? What competing models of society were mediated by the press?

Introduction to Paper Voices Page - 3

The political theme touched newspapers at the point where they intersected directly with public affairs. It enabled us to look at the more manifest purposes of the press - the coverage of events and personalities, the images of political parties, the whole business of electioneering, the expression and shaping of public opinion. In our second theme we hoped to catch the newspapers responding to subtle changes in public consciousness and in the culture. Elections tend to make shapes for themselves, somewhat independently of the press and media. But affluence needed to be shaped - by the press and the media, and in public debate - in order to be understood at all. Here, we tried to catch the press responding to new, complicated social forces, 'working harder' to represent them in swift, commanding images or myths, moving with the culture - often piecemeal, unconvincingly.

What we found does not yield a comprehensive picture of the popular press in three decades of social change. But it does seem to us to clarify the nature of the relationship between the press and society. Our intention, broadly speaking, was to enable us, and later researchers, to pose the essential questions about this relationship in fuller, more complex and refined terms than is possible within the available clichés of influence, bias and effect.

Berelson, one of the fathers of content analysis in the social-science sense of the term, once observed that the crucial question is to know when, and when not, to count. The observation is eminently wise though clearly it can be adapted to support quite different strategies. Those who believe that evidence is not hard until it is quantifiable will assent to Berelson's dictum - and count wherever possible: those who have an intrinsic sense that the type of evidence required is not quantifiable, will invoke Berelson's motto at every turn. The problem cannot be solved in this way.

In this study, we have tried to count and quantify where, and only where, it seemed relevant and economic to do so. When the distribution of content, or the relative weight of editorial attention and emphasis was in question; or where (as in the war years) restrictions on newsprint made the paper's choice of whether, say, to carry heavy correspondence columns or not a significant one; or where we wanted to know how much political coverage of the 1945 General Election turned out to be devoted to Churchill's country-wide tours - it seemed appropriate to summarise the findings in very simple quantifiable terms. But no strict classification scheme was devised and no objective content categories established for the purpose of a massive inventory of the newspapers. The type of evidence which would support or disprove the initial hypotheses of the study seemed to us not graspable in these terms.

Content analysis is at its strongest where manifest content is being analysed, and where the verifiability of any proposition with respect to content has to be supported by 'objective' criteria. Berelson himself has remarked that:

"content analysis is ordinarily limited to the manifest content of the communication and is not normally done directly in terms of latent intention which the content may express... Strictly speaking, content analysis proceeds in terms of what-is-said, and not in terms of why-the-content-is-like-that... "[2]

Literary-critical, linguistic and stylistic methods of analysis are, by contrast, more useful in penetrating the latent meanings of a text, and they preserve something of the complexity of language and connotation which has to be sacrificed in content analysis in order to achieve high validation.

Both methods are based on a long preliminary soak, a submission by the analyst to the mass of his material: where they differ is that content analysis uses this process of soaking oneself to define the categories and build a code (based on an intuitive sense of where the main clusters occur), whereas literary, stylistic and linguistic analysis uses the preliminary reading to select representative examples which can be more intensively analysed. The error is to assume that because content analysis uses precise criteria for coding evidence it is therefore objective in the literal sense of the term: and because literary/linguistic analysis steers clear of code-building it is merely intuitive and unreliable. Literary/linguistic types of analysis also employ evidence: they point, in detail, to the text on which an interpretation of latent meaning is based; they indicate more briefly the fuller supporting or contextual evidence which lies to hand; they take into account material which modifies or disproves the hypotheses which are emerging; and they should (they do not always) indicate in detail why one rather than another reading of the material seems to the analyst the most plausible way of understanding it. Content analysis assumes repetition - the pile-up of material under one of the categories - to be the most useful indicator of significance.

Literary/linguistic and stylistic analysis also employs recurrence as one critical dimension of significance, though these recurring patterns may not be expressed in quantifiable terms. The analyst learns to 'hear' the same underlying appeals, the same 'notes', being sounded again and again in different passages and contexts. These recurring patterns are taken as pointers to latent meanings from which inferences as to the source can be drawn. But the literary/linguistic analyst has another string to his bow: namely, strategies for noting and taking account of emphasis. Position, placing, treatment, tone, stylistic intensification, striking imagery, etc., are all ways of registering emphasis. The really significant item may not be the one which continually recurs, but the one which stands out as an exception from the general pattern - but which is also given, in its exceptional context, the greatest weight.

The analysis of language and rhetoric, of style and presentation, was therefore chosen as the main method of the study in preference to more 'objective' approaches. In part, we wanted to examine how far these traditional methods of criticism could be adapted to the study of social meanings in a popular medium. But the more forceful considerations related to the angle from which we approached our material. The intention throughout has been to adopt procedures which would enable us to get behind the broad distribution of manifest content to the latent, implicit patterns and emphases. We wanted to bring to light, not the direct and explicit political or social appeals the newspapers made, but the structures of meanings and the configurations of feeling on which this public rhetoric is based. We wanted to know what image of the readers the newspaper was taking for granted when it assumed it could write in that way about politics and society. We wanted to know what image of the society supported the particular treatment given to any set of topics. We wanted to know how such assumptions came to be formed - in response to what historical and social circumstances: and how, through time, they were changed or adapted. What concerned us was, precisely, the question given the lesser prominence in Berelson's paradigm: 'why-the-content-is-like-that'. Our purpose was, where possible, to uncover the unnoticed, perhaps unconscious, social framework of reference which shaped the manifest content of a newspaper over relatively long periods of time.

Our strategy, therefore, reversed the traditional emphases of mass communications research. Such studies, typically, concentrate on the inventory of daily content, on overt appeals, opinions and biases, treating underlying meaning-structures as, essentially, the residues of long habitual practice. Our study was based on the initial hypothesis that, once such implicit patterns were brought to light, we would see that they exerted a shaping force over the treatment, on any particular day, of the events and personalities in the news. We suggest that, alongside any day's news', there is a continuous and evolving definition of what constitutes news at any significant historical moment. Naturally, such an analysis must begin with manifest content and rhetoric, but it must find ways of moving through and beyond that to the social foundations of the rhetoric: an investigation, as Umberto Eco describes it, 'into the reciprocal relations of a rhetoric and an ideology (both seen as "cultural" phenomena and so limited by historical and social implications)'.[3]

We adopted the practice of giving as much of the evidence in its own terms as we could manage:

so that the reader can see for himself how a particular interpretation has been arrived at, and also check the reading offered against the material and offer counter-interpretations where they seem appropriate. This accounts, in part, for what may seem the over-insistent documentation of the study, the length of the quotations offered, and the fullness of the supporting evidence, since the texts studied will not be readily available to most readers.

Newspapers represent the 'marketable commodities' in an industrial and technical complex which is highly capitalised, and competitive. A full study of the press must take into account, at one end of the spectrum, the technical and social organisation of the newspaper industry; and, at the other end, the readers who buy, read, use and discard 'the product'. The flow of news, from news gatherers to readers, is a highly organised and institutionalised social process: a process of cultural production and consumption'.

Our study, deliberately, concentrates on only one aspect of this exchange - though we ourselves would argue that the study is not completed until the social product has been set back within, and interpreted in the fight Of its structural position in this process of cultural production. We began with the least studied element - the contents and forms of the press. treated as privileged modes of communication in their own right. Here a necessary distinction must be drawn. It was not the purpose of this study to rank or judge the style of the Express or Mirror in literary terms. While certain evaluations could not be avoided, 'qualitative measures were used, not - as is traditional in the literary-critical approach - to enforce a critical judgement, but to establish and support a reading of the material in terms of its social and historical meaning. Both kinds of approach are evaluative, but they point in different directions. It did not seem to us any longer right to retain, separate from the study of meaning, a reserved area for the analysis of literary/aesthetic values per Se. Our intention here was to integrate the study of style, language, expression and rhetoric directly into the study of social meaning itself.

On the one hand, against the main weight of sociological practice, we approached the newspaper as a structure of meanings, rather than as a channel for the transmission and reception of news. Our study, therefore, treated newspapers as texts: literary and visual constructs, employing symbolic means, shaped by rules, conventions and traditions intrinsic to the use of language in its widest sense. On the other hand, we isolated this 'moment' in the analysis expressly in order to make, from the heart of the linguistic/stylistic analysis of the text, social and historical inferences and interpretations.

Newspapers are not simply noisy channels which connect one end of an information exchange with another. They employ verbal, visual and typographic means for 'making events and people in the news signify' for their readers. Every newspaper is a structure of meanings in linguistic and visual form. It is a discourse. All newspapers have distinctive rhetorics, ways of organising the elements into a coherent whole, styles of presentation. These represent so many ways of reducing the formlessness of events to that socially-shaped, historically-contingent product we call 'news' - for potentially, every event on any day in the whole world is 'news'. Ale patterns of meanings imposed on events, the logics of arrangement and presentation, are not given in the raw material: even when events have a meaning of their own, those meanings are modified, and sometimes transformed, when they enter an already formed discourse or linguistic 'space'. Each style - whether of an individual writer or a newspaper - is a system of meaningful choices, and these choices are 'epistemic': they are clues to the epistemology of those who produce and employ them. Raymond Williams has made the connections between structure, audience and style quite precise:

"What would happen, for example, if no Times or the Guardian headlined their correspondence columns 'You Write' or 'You're Telling Us'? It is a simple enough check: we know whether we have written and told them or not. But 'you' within a real community of interest is still specific, and the impersonality of 'Reader's Letters' is then a form of politeness. 'You' in the modem popular paper, on the other hand, means everyone who is not us: we who are writing the paper for 'you' out there. There are often blurred edges, but the line between those papers which assume quite different relationships - readers seen as consumers, as a market or potential market-is not too difficult to draw, and is usually directly visible in layout and style."[4]

Newspapers employ a variety of ways of distributing 'the news' throughout their pages. They construct the news within the grid of existing 'common-sense' categories. Over time, these categories become convenient ways of pigeon-holing the data and generate distinctive idioms of their own. By situating an event within one or another of these categories, a newspaper signifies to its readers where it considers the event to 'belong', in what context it is to be understood. The traditional newspaper categories - front-page news story, feature, woman's page, gossip, sport, leader column-represent ongoing schemes of interpretation. They are intended to awaken in the reader contexts of awareness,[5]appropriate referential associations. These are the habitual and inherited 'native schemes of classification' of the press as a discourse in our culture. Thus some items clearly 'belong' to the sports page: and if a sports item appears on a news page, it is because the newspaper has judged (and expects its readers to agree) that one context has prevailed over another. The banning of South Africa by the International Lawn Tennis Association is a hard news (front page) item, and could lead on to feature and leader column treatment (middle pages), though its topic is specifically sport (back pages), because its political context has been judged more significant than its sport context. Newspaper categories are, by now, so traditional and routine that we have to take our distance from them in order to bring to light, reflexively, what their 'meaning' is, and how they function as codes of signification. The process of sedimentation[6]- meaningful categories becoming so routine that they seem the natural way of making up newspapers - is a common phenomenon throughout the field of mass communications. Only when new categories arise - the Mirror's Mirrorscope feature, the Observer’s Business Section, the Sunday Times's Insight features, the Guardian's Women's Page or the Colour Supplements -do we become aware that something more than a simple journalistic innovation or change in format is taking place. New categories suggest major shifts in the direction of a newspaper's appeal, changes in readership, or an assumed shift in the pattern of readers' interests and attention, and thus, indirectly, in cultural assumptions - those taken-for-granted, 'seen but unnoticed background features and expectancies' by means of which people share a collective world of cultural meanings.

A newspaper can also emphasize or depress individual items on a scale of significance by their positioning on a page, or by employing the whole repertoire of typographical distinctions: headlining, underlining, hold use of types, streamline elaborations, attention getting captions, with or without illustration, and so on. Part of the folklore of newspaper layout is that there are consistent patterns in the ways newspapers are read - e.g. hardly ever from front to back in a steady progress: and in the way individual pages are read - top left first, bottom left last. Focus of attention (and thus of significance) can be used by a newspaper as another way of ordering the news, either by working with these perceptual patterns, or by deliberately breaking them: using typographical devices to guide the reader's attention from the most crucial to the least crucial item on a page.

Newspapers not only employ classifying schemes. They develop special rhetorics. Some of these operate broadly across the whole spectrum of the national press. In general - whatever the paper - women's pages will be lighter in treatment, chattier; editorials are weighty, resonant, offering evaluative judgements, seeking to wield influence with readers or in high places; features are more personal, informative, analytic. Each of these available rhetorics carries powerful social connotations. politics is 'hard stuff where 'tough decisions' are made and about which newspapers have 'views'; women are less interested in politics - there is some such thing as the 'feminine interest' with a typically 'feminine' range of topics; features enable us to make sense of the rapid march of wars disasters and decisions across the front page; sport is entertainment time out from politics and women, masculine and competitive, full of thrills and the unexpected; and so on. These are complex social registers. Indeed, the informal topics of news - as indeed of other themes in social life - appear to generate distinctive 'fields of association', semantic, lexical and linguistic 'sub-worlds', which define and circumscribe particular areas of experience. Our public language is in part built up out of these semantic and rhetorical clusters, and we inhabit such social registers both in our everyday speech and in our public communications.

Within those generally available rhetorics, each newspaper makes a selection of rhetorics appropriate to its persona; and these come to characterise the newspaper as a distinctive entity. Since, in our matrix, the individual styles of a newspaper represent a registration in language of the assumed social world of its readers: for example the elaborated linguistic constructions and punctilious syntax of the 'quality' press, as compared with the restricted codes, truncated syntax and vivid vocabulary of the 'populars'. Even newspapers which, broadly speaking, occupy the same end of the spectrum will develop distinctive rhetorics and styles - compare, for example, the two quite distinctive types of demotic speech employed by the Express and the Mirror. Such epistemic choices' characterize the discourse of particular newspapers over relatively long periods of time. They nourish the image and personality of the newspaper.

This analysis could be extended. But perhaps enough has been said to establish the point that newspapers employ verbal, rhetorical, visual and presentational means as a structure of complex codes for giving 'the news' significance. Such codes, the way they orchestrate the day's news, constitute the heart, the matrix, of a newspaper as a 'structured totality'. It is only when we learn to interpret the codes, and the social meanings on which they are founded. that we are in a position to grasp the newspaper as a cultural product. This is not to deny that newspapers are also channels for the exchange of information between the producers and consumers of 'news'. But it leads us to insist that the two types of analysis cannot be collapsed into one. Cultural studies requires us to work back to the social and historical process through the necessary mediations of form and appearance, format, rhetoric and style.

We have spoken of the persona or personality of a newspaper. Newspapers are not, of course, persons': but, without pushing the parallel to absurd lengths, each does maintain through time something like a collective identity. just as our sense of the identity of a person depends to a great extent upon his appearance, style of being-in-the-world, how he presents himself in the same way the collective identity of a newspaper rests not simply on what is said (the predominant number of items in all newspapers on the same day being largely determined by events outside their control) but on how what is said is presented, coded, shaped, within a set of signifying meaning-structures. Gregory Stone observes that 'By appearing, the person announces his identity, shows his value, expresses his mood or proposes his attitude . . . whenever we clothe ourselves, we dress "towards" or address some audience whose validating responses are essential to the establishment of our self. He adds:

"Appearance, then, is that phase of the social transaction which establishes identifications of the participants. As such it may be distinguished from discourse, which we conceptualise as the text of the transaction - what the parties were discussing. Appearance and discourse are two distinct dimensions of the social action. The former seems the more basic."[7]

Newspapers, then, do not merely report the news: they 'make the news meaningful'. Their linguistic and visual styles their presentation and format, their address to audiences and topics, their rhetorics and appearance offer us the vital clues to their collective identities. such matters of style and appearance are not simply referable to the production and presentational choices of the editorial team and its managers. Though speaking to readers from a position outside their world', and about topics on which it is well informed and they are relatively ignorant, the newspaper is, nevertheless, the product of a social transaction between producers and readers. Successful communication in this field depends to some degree on a process of mutual confirmation between those who produce and those who consume. At the same time, the producers hold a powerful position vis-a-vis their audiences, and they must play the primary role in shaping expectations and tastes. The notion that the Mirror or the Express simply reflect the society as it is, and 'give the people what they want', begs the crucial question of how 'the people', who do not have the means of communication at their command, know 'what they want' until a model has been offered to them. The point has been forcefully made with respect to the growth of the modern popular press by Raymond Williams:

‘...the way of seeing this history that I now want to suggest is first, the emergence of an independent popular press, directly related to radical politics, in the first decades of the nineteenth century; second, the direct attack on this, and its attempted suppression, in the period up to the 1830s... ; and third (and most important as a way of understanding our own situation) the indirect attack, by absorption but also by new kinds of commercial promotion, which aimed not at suppressing the independent popular press but at replacing it, in fact by the simulacrum of popular journalism that we still have in such vast quantities today."[8]

Newspapers' styles, identities, are chosen and maintained with continual reference to some notion of who their readers are, what they will understand, what their social position is, what is their state of knowledge, and so on. Newspapers must continually situate themselves within the assumed knowledge and interests of their readership, consciously or unconsciously adopt modes and strategies of address: they must 'take the attitude of their significant others', their 'imaginary interlocutors', in order to communicate effectively in any particular case about any particular person or event. Language, style and format are therefore the products of a process of reciprocal symbolic interaction between the newspaper and its audiences; and matters of presentation are not only expressive indicators of the newspaper's collective identity, but forms of address to an audience, requiring reciprocal confirmation, and continually underwritten by a structure of informed but informal assumptions.

Such modes and assumptions will not necessarily be consciously recognised by every journalist on the paper, just as a man will not necessarily recognise his own psychological structure; that is why we cannot, as historians in particular tend to suggest, simply go and ask the editors the questions we are applying to the papers.

One of the central ways in which a newspaper presents itself, is in terms of its 'tone'. Tone (the term is derived on the analogy of speech[9]) is a rich and complex mode of linguistic registration. It indicates to the reader an evaluative 'set', or stance, towards a certain topic (or range of topics) taken by 'the speaker'; and it invites the reader to assume a similar stance. Tone is another way in which the underlying assumptions behind an explicit rhetorical style can be traced out and shown to be at work.

We may now return to the point made at the opening of this section: the separation between two kinds of research into newspapers - that which focuses on the social processes by which newspapers are produced, and that which focuses on newspapers as symbolic artefacts. Our point is that these are not two opposing types of research, but essentially complementary. The producer-reader interchange is registered in and mediated through the symbolic structure of the newspaper itself. Without this symbolic mediation, no transaction between editors and readers would be possible. Therefore, the study of the symbolic construct in itself cannot be a subsidiary part of any inquiry, but stands at the very heart of the relationship. Our working hypothesis was that every significant stylistic, visual, linguistic, presentational, rhetorical feature was a sort of silent witness, a meaningful disguised communication',[10] embodying and expressing that relationship: a message' (or metalanguage) about how the 'messages' (items) should be understood. Similarly, every shift in tone and rhetoric, every change in the balance of content, every move in the implied 'logic' in the newspaper signified something more than a mere stylistic shift. At these points, we suggest, we encounter the core meaning-structures of the paper, the value-sets which give the paper a consistent identity over time: we are watching the relationship between paper and readers, defined in one historical situation, being reshaped and redefined under the pressure of new events, new social forces. It is only when we penetrate to the deep structures of the newspaper that we really understand how a paper stands in relation to the society which it 'mirrors' day by day, in the kaleidoscope of items which go to make up that construction of reality we call the news.

We argue that such a structure does emerge from our study of the Mirror and Express. Increasingly, the central point of the study became the effort to trace this structure out precisely, to account for its historical genesis to watch its evolution, and disintegration over time. We should say structures rather than structure: for we found nothing so solid or uniform as a single, over-arching structure in either newspaper, nor any moment in which every item in a single day's newspaper seemed to be coherently orchestrated by a single set of meanings. Every newspaper is a coalition of interests, a negotiated compromise between variety and coherence: so we are speaking of overlapping structures of meaning, rather than a single structure; and of degrees of convergence and structuring rather than of absolute unity. Despite these reservations, we think we located a pattern of recurring meanings and assumptions in different parts of the world of each paper; these patterns seemed both distinctive in their own right, and different from one another.