Small Town Newspapers:
Ethnography and Folkloristics
of Everyday Written Narrative
(Rejected by Journal of American Folklore)
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org
leedrummond@msn.com
Small Town Newspapers:
Ethnography and Folkloristics
of Everyday Written Narrative
Abstract
Although much attention has been given to the ethnography of speech, and
even more attention to the narrative analysis of traditional genres such as folk tales and
myth, relatively little anthropological research has been done on common or everyday
written narrative and its place in community life. Yet as formerly traditional peoples
become modernized and as anthropologists become increasingly interested in their
own, literate societies, the written productions of “new natives” will prove to be an
important source of ethnographic material. This essay seeks to address that issue by
examining the relationships among several communities of western Montana and the
weekly newspapers published in those communities. The central problem of the essay
is the nature of the relation between a community, considered as the object of
ethnographic investigation, and an indigenous written production about that
community, considered as folkloric material. The essay attempts to demonstrate that
that relation is neither arbitrary nor a matter of simple reflection, but an integral
function of the community considered as a system f significations. Distributional and
associative features of newspaper content are examined, and the latter are related to a
complex of ethnographically specified cultural themes that appear to operate in the
several small towns.
This study was conducted and the results analyzed by a collaboration of two
anthropology graduate students at the University of Montana, William Dakin and
Susan Boyd, and myself. Their contributions were invaluable; the project could not
have been done without them.
………………………………………………
2
I
In a collection of seminal essays, William O. Hendricks (1973) argues
persuasively for an approach to narrative analysis that integrates techniques developed
in linguistics and folkloristics. The task of accommodating aspects of the two
disciplines involves him in a consideration of the sharp distinction folklorists have
traditionally drawn between oral and written narrative. He concludes that an adequate
theory of narrative structure would relegate differences between oral and written forms
to a contingent status, regarding them simply as variations in mode of transmission
rather than basic structure. Rather than identify folklore exclusively with oral
narrative, he makes the intriguing suggestion that writing, once acquired, takes on
folkloric functions in a literate society.
A seemingly reasonable hypothesis is that as literacy increases, folklore
increasingly becomes something transmitted by the graphic medium. . .
one can point out that in non-literate societies everything — including
folklore — is orally transmitted. If the society acquires an
orthography, functional uses of language may be differentiated as to
mode of transmission, oral or written. The fact that writing may now be
used for certain functions should not suggest that these functions have
disappeared. (page 84)
Hendricks explores parallels between oral and written narrative structure with
examples drawn from English literature, giving extensive, and brilliant, analyses of
works by William Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, and Ambrose Bierce. Despite his focus on
polished literary works, he notes3 that discourse analysis in its present formative stage
might first examine the everyday accounts of daily experience given by more-or-less
ordinary people before trying to decode the structure of traditional tales told by verbal
artists. The suggestion carries implications that furnish the subject of this essay. In
proposing that folktales and literary works may have more in common structurally than
does either genre with spontaneous verbal activity, Hendricks calls into question the
homology that is sometimes supposed to hold between the two oppositions,
oral/written and non-specialist/specialist. If the status of narrator (language specialist
vs. non-specialist) and the mode of transmission (written vs. oral) are not
determinatively related, then four narrative types based on these binary pairs can be
identified (see Figure 1).
3
Figure 1. Four Permutations of Narrative Type
Oral
Written
Specialist
traditional folklore, professional speakers, disc
jockeys, sportscasters, talk
show hosts, some news
reporters, teachers, clergy,
politicians
Non-Specialist
everyday accounts of personal
experience (ordinary conversations
or what in the media have
become known as “man in the
street” interviews)
literature, national magazines,
large-circulation newspapers,
technical reports, monographs,
business letters
personal letters (individual
focus), school essays, small town
newspapers (group focus)
At present, three of the four narrative types identified in the paradigm are
subjects of lively scholarly discussion. The “specialist” oral genre of traditional
folklore (which may now be extended to include productions of modern verbal
performers such as television news reporters and talk show moderators) are under the
competent scrutiny of the folklorist and, for more recent productions, the cultural
studies analyst. The “specialist” written genre of literature, (including national
magazines and other highly polished professional works) are intensively studied by
literary critics of every persuasion, including a large coterie of the cultural studies
people. The “non-specialist” oral genre of everyday speech and individuals’ accounts
of personal experiences (what the media calls “man in the street” accounts) is the
subject of exciting research by workers in the rapidly expanding field of “the
ethnography of speaking.”4
The fourth type, however, which consists of the written productions of nonspecialists, has been less well examined. In a brief programmatic article on “the
ethnography of writing,” Basso (1974: 425-432) argues that written productions should
be investigated as parts of wider cultural systems, and these investigations fitted into a
developing ethnography of communication. Basso suggests the personal letter in
American society as a subject to be used in mapping out an emergent ethnography of
writing. This essay focuses on another kind of non-specialist written production, the
small town newspaper, and seeks to identify semiotic/semantic features of that genre
which advance the ethnography of writing. 5
4
The study on which the essay is based involved several intensive months of
meticulous examination and coding of newspapers from eighteen communities in
western Montana.6 During the study, two research associates, William Dakin and
Susan Boyd of the University of Montana7, and I were struck by the intriguing
relationships that appeared to exist between a community and its newspaper.
Implications of those relationships bear directly on current theoretical discussions in
anthropology and folkloristics and need to be examined before presenting the empirical
results of the study. The empirical presentation is intended to serve mainly a heuristic
purpose; it will be enough if the analytical procedures employed here and the
semiotic/semantic properties identified substantiate the crucial nature of the following
general remarks.
II
First of all, what is one to make of a first brush with community newspapers of
western Montana? For the most part, they are published in towns that by national
standards are small and isolated in the extreme. A community of 1500 or 2000 persons
is likely to be a county seat, the center of commerce and government, separated from
the nearest town of comparable size by forty or fifty miles of highway that cuts
through the Rocky Mountains and makes travel, particularly during the winter months,
an experience. In the simplest geographical sense, the western Montana town is a true
community, quite distinct from the “municipalities” that cluster around metropolitan
areas, one shading imperceptibly into the next. In this setting of rural isolation, most
community members know one another by sight, know their family ties, business
interests, religious views, and gossip about the rest. Besides this wealth of knowledge,
often garnered beginning in early childhood and extending into old age, the resident of
the western Montana town is supplied with news about state, national, and world
affairs from a variety of media — major Montana newspapers (such as the Great Falls
Tribune and the Missoulian, each serving the region surrounding its city of
publication)8, radio, television, and national magazines (such as Time and Newsweek).
Between these extremes, acknowledging neither the car outside Widow Jones’ house
last night nor the intricacies of détente, is the town’s weekly newspaper. Filled with
accounts of city council meetings, high school sports events, weddings, deaths, and
bridge parties, the small town newspaper is a chronicle of public and semi-public life
— “all news that’s fit to print,” in a sense that is probably close to that intended for the
New York Times of an earlier day.
The small town newspaper is filled with “news” of a particular kind, a kind
distinguished, according to our hypothesis, in that it conveys a sense of community
life, of the community’s distinctive nature. Framing our introduction to the subject in
5
these terms makes it possible to pose clearly the question at the heart of the study:
What is the relation between a community and a local narrative account of its affairs?
Asking this question leads directly to a consideration of the theoretical issues involved
here. In addition to the problem of how oral and written narrative may be related, there
is the overarching problem of how ethnographic and folkloristic approaches are to be
integrated, if at all. Hendricks’ integrative efforts are helpful in approaching this
problem, but his analyses of literary works are intended to expand the heuristic overlap
of linguistics, folkloristics, and literary criticism, and leave the question of the
narrative – community relation mostly unexplored. If one is dealing with community
newspapers, however, it is practically impossible to ignore that relation, since the
materials one works with are themselves narrative renditions of social events.
Ethnography and folkloristics are mutually implicated because the newspaper, as a
description and interpretation of events, is ethnography and, as a culturally-constrained
narrative production (the Widow Jones is never exposed in the pages of the Mission
Valley News), is folklore. In addition, it is impossible to ignore the resonance of
ethnography and folkloristics over a wide range, since both are forms of metadiscourse.
The question of how a narrative account of a community describes, clarifies,
explains what goes on there is at the heart of every ethnographic study. Like the small
town newspaper, the anthropological monograph is (among other things) an account of
what particular people do, of what is noteworthy about their lives, and must be
evaluated according to what it tells, or doesn’t tell, about them. As Geertz (1978)
suggests, the monograph is a literary production; it is just that its scope greatly exceeds
that we usually attribute to the community newspaper. Moreover, the monograph is
largely a second-order, or meta-discursive, rendering of primary narrative materials.
People tell the ethnographer things and he writes them down; people tell other people
things which the ethnographer overhears and writes down; or the ethnographer
observes people and their surroundings and writes down what he sees. Thus oral
tradition, kinship ties, social activities, political affairs, agricultural practices, and the
like are scrutinized through the infinitely complex lens of the written words that spread
across the pages of an ethnographer’s field notebooks and eventual monograph.
This is not to say that the ethnographer and the journalist pursue the same craft,
but the disdain the former often feels for the latter’s work (occasionally dismissing it as
impressions gleamed from eavesdropping at diplomatic cocktail parties) should not be
allowed to spill over into a related problem area: How does the ethnographer handle
narrative material produced by local journalists describing events in the fieldwork
area? It is well enough to dismiss members of the international press corps, cooling
their heels around hotel bars in the capital city of a Third World country, but the
conscientious ethnographer cannot afford to ignore the (often wildly interpretive)
6
content of local publications, nor community members’ reactions to them.
In considering that material, the ethnographer really must assume the
interpretive role assigned him by Geertz. Something happens, someone tells a reporter
about it, he writes it down, it becomes part of a story, gets edited (often by the reporter
himself on a small town newspaper), is published, read, and perhaps even taken into
account by readers in ways that are highly significant to the outsider who is trying to
take all that, and much, much more into account in producing his own text about those
readers and their culture. Metadiscourse, telling about telling, whether at one, two,
three or more removes from the actual episode (and often the episode itself is a telling),
is the stock-in-trade of both ethnographer and journalist, and it is what leads them,
sometimes consciously for the former, perhaps less often for the latter, into reflecting
on their respective crafts’ association with folklore and its interpretation. Unlike
Sergeant Joe Friday, who only wanted “just the facts, ma’am,” the ethnographer knows
(or should know) that there is no clear separation between what goes on in a particular
situation and what people think and say about what goes on (and, if we follow
Wittgenstein rather than Sergeant Friday, we may conclude that the saying is more
accessible than the goings-on).
It is the concern with interpreting the said, the Aussagen, that brings
ethnography and folkloristics together. Telling a tale within hearing distance of a
folklorist normally results in the production of a text, and even when the folklorist’s
emphasis is on verbal performance9 there remains the important, if mundane,
consideration that performance is rendered and discussed mainly in the pages of
sparsely illustrated academic publications. Metadiscursive analysis is the very nature
of folkloristic studies. Someone tells a story — myth, legend, humorous anecdote, or
whatever — and the folklorist seeks to determine its significance. Depending on his
interests, he approaches the text in terms of its internal narrative structure, its position
within a corpus of texts, its sociocultural context, or some combination of these.
Ethnographers of communication insist in principle on the embeddedness of texts in a
cultural system, and consequently regard the three approaches mentioned here as
necessarily interdependent. We submit that an especially nice example of this
interdependence is to be found in the small town newspapers of our study. The case
studies in Bauman and Sherzer (1974) pursue the theme of verbal performance as a
sociocultural phenomenon; here we shall argue that those studies can profitably be
extended to cover written folk productions as well.
Our view that small town newspapers can be interpreted as folk productions
requires elaboration, for, as we have come to understand, identifying the relation
between a community and its newspaper rests on the concept of a human community
itself as a group of speaking, hearing, understanding subjects. There is a potential
difficulty in approaching small town newspapers as folk productions, for generally the
7
former are more closely associated with a discrete population than the latter. Myth,
legend, riddles, and other traditionally conceived genres of “folklore” differ from
newspaper stories in that they are presumed to be relatively free of context: the same
traditional tale or a closely related variant often is told in widely separated and
linguistically diverse speech communities. Even granting the important performative
features of these tales which ethnographers of communication have identified, it is still
clear that they lend themselves more readily to formal narrative analysis. For example,
the value of Hendricks’ studies consists in demonstrating the heuristic range of
structural analysis across the fields of oral and written literature. Can something like
that be done for community newspapers?
We suggest that, while a study of small town newspapers which restricted itself
to discourse analysis would be helpful, it is better to begin by approaching them as
texts firmly anchored in particular human communities. Unlike myth, newspaper
stories are about particular persons and particular events (although it is an intriguing
question whether, say, the premier of China is any more concrete to a western Montana
logger than is a mythical demiurge to a South American Indian). The folkloric quality
of newspaper stories consists less in their formal narrative properties than in their
authors’ acceptance of a whole set of assumptions about what “news” is and how it is
to be reported. Since the basic issue here is the relation of a community to its
narrative, we are led to the view that an analysis of a newspaper narrative is inevitably
part of an analysis of a cultural system.
It is crucial to be precise here. The approach to narrative-community
relationships we propose differs significantly from that briefly indicated by Hendricks
(pp. 143-144). His goal in bringing linguistics and folkloristics together is to get
“beyond the sentence,” which for him involves emphasizing the distinction between a
formal and a sociological analysis of texts. In the former approach, social order is
thought to be “built into the stories” (page 143) in such a way that a formal analysis of
narrative structure automatically says something about the organization of cultural
themes in the community. In the latter approach, the community is presumed to exist
“outside the stories as something assumed, which the analyst can then correlate with
what is actually in the stories.” Our previous remarks about the western Montana
newspaper suggest that this analytical dichotomy cannot be maintained in practice, and
that in its place an integral concept of the narrative-community relationship is required,
one which combines ethnographic and folkloristic perspectives. The formal approach
is inadequate because newspaper narrative is interpretive, and so “builds in” the
community only in a complex sense. It is assuredly not an isomorphic reflection — a
kind of Malinowskian charter — of social relations. The sociological approach is
even wider of the mark for it assumes that a sociocultural order — the community —
can somehow be given form independently of accounts of it. This formulation is
8
inadequate to the task before us, for we are not dealing with two things here — a group
of communities and a set of narratives about them — but with a single system of
significations which are not merely attached to particular human groups, but
constitutive of them. A human community is a semiotic construction; it implies and is
implied by narratives generated by its members.
The outlines of an answer to the question regarding the relation between a
community and its narrative productions are now in sight. The prosaic documents of
our study illustrate, probably better than other written narrative genres, the complex
interconnections that tie language to culture and reconcile individual originality to the
aesthetic and moral norms of society,
III
In attempting to combine ethnographic and folkloristic perspectives, we were
immediately confronted with the problem of editorial originality. Our earlier
suggestion that the eighteen newspapers in our sample are intimately tied to and
representative of their localities of publication is the result of interviews we conducted
with editors and staff of several of the newspapers. This ethnographic exercise,
necessitated in any event by our virtually complete ignorance of journalism as a
profession, produced much useful material on the process through which an editor
survives, or goes under, in a small town. While the details of this process need not be
examined here, it is essential to describe enough of it to show how the ethnographic
investigations contributed to our present views. At the beginning of the interview
series, we were primarily concerned with whether individual editors as practitioners of
a skilled craft, operated for the most part according to a professional creed independent
of the community. If this seemed to be the case, there would obviously be little point
in pursuing the study of small town newspapers as folk productions. Since the
interviews were conducted after considerable textual analysis of the newspapers had
been done, we cannot pretend to a textbook objectivity in their execution and
interpretation. Nevertheless, we were genuinely surprised at the extent to which
community concerns and mores seemed to influence editorial policy. Despite
differences in professional training and experience, the overarching reality in every
case appeared to be the exigencies of life in a small town.
Any small town resident, and particularly someone in the public service role of
a newspaper editor, is constrained in both behavior and expression. This simple fact of
coexistence, of having to interact with an assortment of community members on a
daily basis, was expressed to us in one form or another by every editor we interviewed.
One editor made the point most succinctly:
9
. . . I like running the paper, and I think it ‘s a pretty good one. But I’m
not out to take on the town, just the opposite. This is where my family
and I live, this is our home . . .
It is important to recognize that this individual is not describing an
adversarial standoff, but the importance his belonging to the community
has on his role as editor. Decades of living and working in a town make
an individual part of it, and encourage an easy accommodation between
practices learned years ago in journalism school and the daily flow of existence.
The importance of such an accommodation is more striking in its absence, as
one interview with an embattled young newspaper editor demonstrated. That
individual was fresh from a university school of journalism and had taken on the
editorship of the local newspaper after moving to the town to discover rural America.
Her predecessor, she said, had been a local housewife with a high school education (it
was a small newspaper, even by Montana standards). Although she edited the paper,
the final copy was reviewed by the publisher, who also owned another paper in a
neighboring town. Inspired by investigative reporting and with Bernstein and
Woodward as her models, she found the chronicling of horse shows, pinochle
evenings, and municipal sewerage levies tedious. Still, she recognized the inherent
limitations of the job and, needing the money, decided to stick it out. The months that
followed were a lesson in the shaping of editorial behavior. Readers called or wrote to
complain that obscure social events were not reported, the names of dinner guests
omitted, or remarks at public meetings quoted when they should have remained “out of
the paper.” Even with her policy of tailoring coverage to the community’s needs and
desires, the editor found that each new issue brought a stream of unexpected criticism.
At the time of the interview, she had about decided to resign her posittion.
These interviews support our earlier observation that small town newspapers
are difficult to classify as written narrative produced by specialists. While the editor is
distinguished from other town residents as the holder of a specialized role involving
verbal ability, competent performance of that role requires exacting attention to
collective sentiment.10 The editor’s personality, political views, and even recreations
(one editor in our study regularly published photographic essays of his vacations) may
well affect paper content, but his livelihood depends entirely on community acceptance
of the product. The editor as professional and as local businessman must be
accommodated within the same person, and those editors one meets are generally
individuals who have successfully carried this off. It is quite simply a matter of being
of the community.
10
The question of editorial originality, of the editor’s supposedly specialized role,
addresses an important issue in folkloristics: the dichotomy of creativity vs. convention
in the production of narrative. To what extent is the verbal artist’s work primarily an
expression of his individual talent and to what extent is it a statement of the common
understanding? Our study adds a peculiar twist to this discussion, for its findings
contradict the usual view that the oral narrator is more constrained than the writer by
community sentiment. Bogatyrev and Jakobson (1929: 906) held that the “preventive
censorship of the community” applied with more force to the teller of stories, who
depended on immediate audience response, than to the writer, who could compose
flagrantly antisocial works that need not see the light of day for years. Hendricks
(page 85) rightly counters that oral and written works alike need to be examined as
both individual and social creations. His point is particularly relevant to our study,
since newspapers in rural Montana reverse the situation described by Bogatyrev and
Jakobson by being much more subject to community censorship than is informal, oral
gossip. What gets said in “street talk” (where the Widow Jones’ nocturnal activities
are mercilessly dissected) would never appear in the “Local and Social” column of the
town newspaper. It would probably be correct to extend this observation to U. S.
society in general, since the written word carries a sharper sting — and greater legal
jeopardy — than the spoken. The practice of putting out a community newspaper is
actually an extreme example of the constraints on communicating at all: something
new must be said for communication to occur, but the novelty of the account has to be
compromised, firmly grounded in the already known and accepted.
IV
Our approach to the actual textual analysis of the eighteen newspapers in the
sample was governed by a desire to build a framework for systematic comparison. If
communities can be studied as intermeshed systems of signification, then their
newspapers, as parts of those systems, should furnish information about similarities
and differences among them. The overarching question here is whether the stories that
people read about themselves are basically alike from town to town, or whether there
are significant differences. If differences exist, these need to be documented and related to the sociocultural context in which they occur. Our initial assumption (call it an
hypothesis if you like) was that significant differences are likely present and related in
some fashion to intra-regional variations in western Montana society. While that
region and, indeed, much of the mountain states area, may appear homogeneous to a
metropolitan observer, residents in fact note social variations that are tied to readily
documented demographic and economic conditions. We give here the barest outline of
11
those social variations, but urge that a full-blown attempt to combine ethnographic and
folkloristic approaches in narrative analysis would require extensive fieldwork in the
virtually unstudied communities.
The communities are located in an eight-county region of northwestern
Montana bordered by Idaho on the west and south, the Continental Divide on the east
and Canada on the north. The terrain is more or less mountainous, with towns and
roads laid out in the network of valleys cutting through the ranges of the Rockies.
Although most settlements are small and isolated, there is one in the region (Missoula)
that counts as a major city by Montana standards, with a population of about 55,000.
The productive sector of the regional rural economy is concentrated in forest industries
and ranching, with emphasis on the former. An increasingly important factor in the
economy as well as in other social institutions is recreational and retirement property
development. Topography dictates the economy of particular localities. Timber can
be harvested on the slopes of all valley walls — subject to environmental regulations
— but the floors of some valleys are so narrow and rock-strewn that agriculture is of
minor importance. Only two valleys are broad and fertile enough to make ranching the
predominant way of life, and in one of those (the Bitterroot), which is located near
Missoula, residential subdivisions have sprung up in many pastures and fields.
In the northern part of the region, around Glacier National Park, ski
developments, a large tract of wilderness, and a large lake make tourism and retirement
homes the major focus of local economies. Minimal ethnic diversity is present in the
form of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The region’s 4,000 Native Americans
comprise about 2.5 per cent of the total population of 157,000. All these demographic,
economic, and ethnic variations are represented in the communities of our sample.
Four issues of each paper, with comparable publication dates, were selected to
provide a representative corpus. Rather than attempt detailed narrative analyses of a
few selected portions of the papers, we opted instead for a broad-brush study of
substantial portions of the content of each of the seventy-two papers.11
Detailed topical information was assembled for each article that fell into one of
the following categories: every item on the front page; every “opinion” piece (letters,
editorials) on the editorial page; the two longest articles in the rest of the paper; and the
two largest advertisements on pages two and three of the paper. Using these criteria,
we obtained specific data on fifteen to twenty-five articles for each issue of the
seventy-two newspapers, for a total sample of 1,320 articles.
This volume of material imposes restraints both on methodology and on the
kinds of data that can be fitted into a comparative framework. Regarding
methodology, it is immediately evident that flexibility in comparative procedures can
be had only with computer processing. Our selection of a program was strongly
influenced by a predisposition favoring the human coder over the machine. We feel
12
that computer-based analysis of narrative has a reasonable possibility of productive
results if the machine is introduced only after professionally trained coders have read
and prepared the material. The problem with machine reading, as we understand it, is
simply that semantic rules cannot be written that will enable the most sophisticated
program to scan a text and produce a useful summary of its message. The basic and
apparently simple question, “What is this article about?”, can be answered in a few
sentences by a literate human but not by a machine.12
With this in mind we opted for the FAMULUS program, which applies
Boolean algebra to indexical studies of documentary collections. The program allows
searches across ten information fields, all of which we utilized in the coding operation.
All coding of substantive material was done by the three members of the research staff
(Dakin, Boyd, and Drummond), who consulted with and cross-checked each other’s
work to insure maximum consistency.
Apart from labeling information which consumed four information fields
(name of newspaper, title of article, and so on), the remaining six fields were used for
the following kinds of substantive information:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
Type of article (news item, editorial, etc.).
Topic area (politics, social affairs, economy, education, land use, community
service, legal proceedings).
Scope of article (local through international).
Tone (editorial comment absent or present and, if present, affirmative or
critical; also, whether the actual subject matter of the article was controversial
or innocuous in the context).
Value (dominant value(s) expressed or strongly implied in the article).
Descriptor (ninety-one specific breakdowns of items in the Topic field into
particular kinds of economic activities, decision-making institutions, voluntary
organizations, etc. An important feature of the Descriptor field was the
inclusion of an endorsement predicate _____restrict or _____ promote, which
could be attached to any item in the field to indicate a significant change in its
status. For example, a news item citing recent hospitalizations (a common
feature in most of the newspapers) would receive, among others, the descriptor
HEALTH, while an article on the probable closure of the local hospital would
be coded HEALTH-RESTRICT).)
Our textual analysis of the coded material aims at building a comparative
framework on the basis of two considerations:
13
1)
2)
If our hypothesis that a newspaper is part of a system of significations is at all
sound, then the newspapers of different communities should reveal marked
differences in the distribution of items in the substantive fields of Topic, Scope,
Value, and Descriptor;
A relatively few items in association should reveal semantic
features of newspaper narrative that directly implicate sociocultura1 factors
differentiating communities.
Relevant portions of the distributional study are summarized in Table 1 and
Figure 2. Table 1 simply demonstrates that there are significant differences among the
newspapers in terms of the frequency with which items in the scope and topic fields
get reported. Moreover, a brief examination confirms the fairly obvious fact that
particular items co-vary: newspapers with a high percentage of national and
international affairs articles have a low percentage of local affairs articles, and vice
versa. Similarly, newspapers with extensive political and economic coverage have
little social and community service news, and vice versa. Figure 2 presents the three
newspapers with the highest and lowest frequencies of reporting for each category, and
thereby reveals a correspondence between scope and topic content.
See Table 1 and Figure 2
14
15
16
The Missoulian, Daily Inter Lake, and Hungry Horse News typically carry
numerous national and international stories about political and economic affairs; they
are also published in the three largest communities in the region (Missoula, Kalispell,
and Columbia Falls). The Mission Valley News (Ronan), Northwest Tribune
(Hamilton), and Whitefish Pilot (Whitefish) are distinguished by a concentration on
local social affairs and community service activities. Like the legendary truck stop
café, these correlations neither astonish nor disappoint: papers with large circulations
print more “hard news”; papers with small circulations more “soft news”. Newspapers
hold up the world for inspection by their readers, and if some are filled with accounts
of Arab gunmen and disarmament talks while others run on about the Heart Fund and
the high school basketball game, then these disparate panoramas form part of the
cultural orders of the communities involved. Simple differences in content may well
point to quite fundamental differences in lifestyle and outlook. The two “cities” in our
sample (Missoula and Kalispell) are set apart from the logging towns and ranching
valleys of the region in ways other than newspaper content; the two are poles in an
urban-rural continuum which has complex meanings for the people involved.
Ethnographic research supports this observation. Editors interviewed were quite
explicit about differences between “hard news “ (politics and the economy) and “soft
news “ (social affairs), and about the proper ratio of the two in their newspapers.
One small town resident not connected with a newspaper provided an
interesting, and unsolicited, confirmation of the difference between his town’s
newspaper and one of the regional papers:
I read the Missoulian sometimes, but it doesn’t tell me what’s going
on here . . . who got married, who died, and what Penneys has on sale. I
guess it’s got more news, but it’s just not my paper.
Distributional analysis provides clues to understanding what makes a newspaper of the
community. However, more substantive indications can be gained from a thematic
analysis of associations in newspaper content that appear to be tied to sociocultural
differences. We now turn to a consideration of those associated themes.
The following abbreviated presentation is intended primarily as a heuristic
device to identify thematic features of western Montana narrative and culture. Central
to this discussion is the notion of the newspaper as a forum for community sentiment
and debate. Following on our earlier claim regarding the interpretive nature of
17
newspaper narrative, it would be inaccurate to claim that newspaper A consistently
presents image A of the community, newspaper B image B, etc. We feel that, while
this is true to some extent15 it is important to recognize that what gets left out of a
newspaper — or what is left unsaid of what is included — is also crucial to the
narrative-community relationship. The set of significations a newspaper communicates
is not always, or even primarily, “what goes on,” but what a community is prepared to
read about itself and the outside world. To get at distinctions on this plane requires a
close reading of the texts. Semantics figures at every turn, making the trained human
reader/coder indispensable.
The thematic analysis presented here turns on two pairs of oppositions in the
Tone and Descriptor fields: CONTROVERSIAL/INNOCUOUS subject matter; and
the endorsement predicates, ____PROMOTE/____RESTR1CT. The newspaper as
forum places community members in a larger social milieu in several ways. Sensitive
issues, those with a sting, can be confronted or skirted. This is the essential point
behind the Tone opposition, CONTROVERSIAL/INNOCUOUS. These categories are
not the same as the “hard news” vs. “soft news”, political-economic vs. social affairscommunity service oppositions in Topic distribution. The difference is intimately tied
to context, and hence semantics. One city council meeting (a “hard,” political event)
can be a ho-hum affair of budgeting for a new police car or granting building permits,
while another can be (as in an actual case) a scene of bitter conflict over imposing a
dog ordinance (or, sometimes, a horse or fowl ordinance) where none existed before.
Articles that describe events without mentioning or strongly implying their
(potentially) controversial nature were thus coded INNOCUOUS, and the others
CONTROVERSIAL.
Another aspect of the newspaper as forum is seen in its stance toward social
change. With increasing demands on its forest, water, and mineral resources by a
government bent on national self-sufficiency, and with increasing numbers of urban
refugees moving in (the “Californication” of Montana), changes in western Montana
are occurring rapidly. The endorsement predicates ____PROMOTE/____RESTRICT
in the Descriptor field represent our attempt to categorize the orientation of newspaper
narrative to social change. For an endorsement predicate to be applied to a particular
descriptor, say TOURISM or ENERGY, the article must describe a state of affairs in
which the activity is likely to be enhanced or diminished. Absence of an endorsement
predicate for any descriptor in the article (as in the majority of cases) indicates a
neutral orientation to the activity narrated.
We submit that the frequency and type of endorsements indicates something
about a community’s orientation to social change. The newspaper as a forum for
confronting change falls between two extremes: the paper either accepts or rejects
changes in important areas of local social life. Obviously, not all ____PROMOTE
18
predicates endorse change, nor do all ____RESTRICT predicates reject it. The status
quo is often championed in the small town newspaper, as evidenced by
____RESTRICT predicates attached to the descriptors GUN CONTROL,
SUBDIVISION, and TAXES. Similarly, these status-maintaining ____RESTRICT
functions may occur in company with PROMOTE predicates for the descriptors,
FARMING and GRAZING.
Following this line of thought, we identified a thematic opposition that
complements and crosscuts the CONTROVERSIAL/INNOCUOUS opposition, and
labeled it CHANGE POSITIVE/CHANGE NEGATIVE. Here the program’s facility
for Boolean operations proved indispensable, for it was necessary to construct search
formulae of up to twenty-two terms. The procedure yields dual semantic continuua,
with newspapers laid out along the resulting matrix according to the degree to which
social change is actually or implicitly encouraged or rejected.
The salient difference here is basically between newspapers that convey a sense
of preserving a rural lifestyle in the face of external pressure to change, and
newspapers that adopt a responsive, even eager attitude, toward development.
The elements of our comparative framework are now complete. Combining the
two semantic axes yields the paradigmatic array in Figure 3.
See Figure 3
19
20
The coordinates of the newspapers on the semantic axes indicate their relative
tendency to air sensitive issues and, usually among these, to confront issues of social
change. The two axes are complementary, with a wide range along one vector and a
fairly narrow range along the other.
The paradigm in Figure 3 does not conflict with the order of newspapers
according to Topic distribution (Figure 2), but it does add significantly to it by
grouping newspapers according to thematic properties. Identifying these makes it
possible to discern something of the relation between ethnographic and folkloristic
approaches to written narrative. Communities whose newspapers lie to the upper right
of the intersecting median points are all either the large towns or logging towns, or
both (that is, towns where the health of commerce is synonymous with the state of
forest industries). The high incidence of endorsement predicates assigned to
controversial issues in those newspapers creates an accurate impression of the
communities’ typically engaged stance vis-à-vis government, environment, and
economy. According to our narrative analysis, timber workers and townspeople have
something in common, which contrasts with other members of western Montana
communities. The latter are predominantly ranchers and retirees — including those
young or middle-aged “retirees” who have opted out of urban U.S. society — and it is
significant that these groups, along with Native Americans, make-up the population of
towns with newspapers in the lower left-hand quadrant of the paradigm. Those
newspapers evince a strong internal focus, and project an image of the community as
an expressive, uncomplicated world of school functions, social events, and the like.
V
While our narrative analysis could be extended, enough has been presented to
show that the community-narrative relationship is significant and merits close attention
in future studies of written narrative. Enquiries that pursue ethnographic and
folkloristic lines simultaneously offer many possibilities for cross-fertilization. Some
of our previous ethnographic work (Drummond et al 1975) suggests that cultural
themes in western Montana fit into a scheme familiar to students of narrative: the
triangle.
There is empirical support for the view that we are not dealing here with yet
another refrain of the rural/urban dichotomy, but rather with a triadic scheme of
21
complementary and opposed elements. In the communities of our study, these
elements are symbolic and behavioral constellations tied to the three principal modes
of life: ranching, logging, and town life or retirement (see Figure 4).
The thesis, which we cannot develop fully here, is that these activities serve as
the nuclei of cultural themes that make themselves felt throughout the institutional
fabric of society — in family life, kinship ties, school activities, political orientation,
land use, recreation, and more. If this interpretation has any validity, then the thematic
comparisons developed in our narrative analysis support an approach to folklore much
like that Bauman (1972: 31-41) espouses: folklore is not to be understood as the
singular possession of distinct folk groups, but as interacting performances (and, we
would add, narrations) among groups. According to this view, as we employ it here,
human groups tell themselves and others stories about their respective identities, and
only through that complex process of intertelling and interacting do they constitute
themselves, laying claim to boundaries that are always conceptual, always shifting,
always contested. Western Montana ranchers, loggers, and townspeople have roots in
a history and stakes in a future that are given form only through a long, involved, and
inherently contradictory process of mutual interaction and interpretation. Their
combined stories yield up composite identities that are not internally consistent, nor do
they clearly differentiate one identity from another. They are vectorial movements in a
22
multidimensional cultural space. This critical process is carried out, in part, in the
mundane forums of the Tobacco Valley News, the Plainsman, and the Ronan Pioneer.
An adequate understanding of how their narratives enter into the live of western
Montanans requires developing an ethnography of the communication of cultural
identity.
23
Notes
1. Instances are to be found in Bogatyrev and Jakobson (1929) and Abrahams (1969).
2. Hendricks (p. 83) with Ben-Amos (1971) and Hymes (1962).
3. Following Labov and Waletzky (1967).
4. For illustrative works, see Bauman and Sherzer (1974), Gumperz and Hymes
(1972), Labov (1970), and Fishman (1975).
5. It may appear mistaken to call any newspaper a “non-specialist” production, since
its contents are the work of trained individuals with specific roles in the
community. Discussion of this point must await the following discussion of
convention and creativity. For now it is enough to note that contributors to a small
town newspaper are often formally untrained in journalism, and that even a
journalism school graduate produces, in the role of weekly newspaper editor, a
product discernibly different from that of an urban newspaper reporter.
6. The Institute for Social Research, University of Montana, assisted materially and
intellectually by making available facilities and staff and by providing, through its
director, Raymond Gold, a marvelous sounding board for ideas. The project was
funded by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service.
7. As noted throughout this essay, William Dakin and Susan Boyd, graduate students
in anthropology at the University of Montana, contributed substantively to every
phase of he project. Their individual assistance and ideas are here gratefully
acknowledged.
8. The Missoulian is located in the project survey area and is included in the study.
The Great Falls Tribune, published in Great Falls, is across the Continental Divide
from the survey area and is not included.
9. As, for example, in Bauman (1975).
24
10. A lively forum for individual criticism does exist in another narrative genre present
in the small towns of our study. This is the “street talk” that occurs among
residents while shopping in the downtown area, picking up their mail at the post
office, sitting in the town’s one or two beauty parlors, hanging out at the drive-in,
drinking in the bar. The editor, like everyone else with public visibility, is
routinely monitored by “street talk” and, if he is at all astute, uses it as a guide in
his reporting.
11. We feel this generalized search for comparisons is justified by the exploratory
nature of the study. Not knowing which features of newspaper narrative would
prove distinctive, it was important to cast as wide net as possible. Still, fascinating
work could be done on structural narrative analyses of such forms as the wedding
announcement, the obituary, and the sports article,
12. For an excellent critique of the current state of content analysis in social research,
see Markoff et al (1974).
13. Interestingly named, a famulus being the secretary of a Medieval scholar.
14. For a discussion of these values and their method of identification, see Rokeach
(1973).
15. For example, newspapers with extensive coverage of high school sports and local
weddings probably do reflect rather strong community interest in such events.
16. For variations on this theme, see Olrik (1965) and Lévi-Strauss (1966) .
25
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