Chapter 5 of 8
CHAPTER FIVEOne story, many headlines
Everywhere else in this archive, a difference between two clippings could be a difference between two events. Not here. A wire cluster is one body of copy printed in several papers, so the story is held constant and every difference in the headline is a choice made in a local newsroom with the same words in front of it.
IN THIS ARCHIVE
108 sets of overlapping transcribed text are detectable here, covering 256 records; 106 of them appeared under more than one headline. They run from two-paper pairs up to one dispatch that reached eight papers in a week. The rule requires different mastheads, printings no more than seven days apart, and enough shared six-word sequences to clear the archive’s high or medium confidence bar. Relaxing that bar to include every candidate set gives 132 and 330; the thresholds were chosen, not derived.
On 9 July 1972 a car bomb killed the writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut. Five American papers ran the same dispatch:
Bomb Kills Leader, Arabs Vow RevengeDemocrat and Chronicle, 1972See the clipping
Palestinian Guerrilla Is SlainGreensboro Daily News, 1972See the clipping
Israel Accused in Assassination BlastThe Flint Journal, 1972See the clipping
Palestinian Guerrilla Leader Dies In BlastThe Mobile Register, 1972See the clipping
Mideast guerrillas pledge to revenge chief’s bomb deathThe Sunday Oregonian, 1972See the clipping
Same body. Same day. In one paper Israel is accused; in another a man dies in a blast.
THE LIMIT
No rate for American newspapers can be drawn from any of this, for three reasons. The collection decides where a match is possible at all: a set can only appear where two different papers from the same week were both collected and both transcribed. This archive was partly assembled by looking for these pairs, so the figure describes the search. And 851 records carry too little transcribed text to compare, so what is counted is overlapping transcription, not a dispatch — establishing that two papers ran the same agency copy takes a person reading both. Two sets carry the same headline in both papers. They belong on this page as much as the others.
This research is still being worked through. Every count drawn from the archive is recomputed from the records each time the page is built, and every figure from outside it is printed with the query that produced it. Where a finding has changed, the correction is printed beside it rather than quietly swapped in. More of it is still being checked, and some of it will move.
Last updated 2 November 2026
Every figure about this archive is computed from the records at build time. Every figure from outside it is logged with the query that produced it.
All eight chapters · How this archive was built · What the papers repeated · Search the archive · The data
Collected, transcribed and checked by Maria Robles · maria@rozumstudio.com