Analyzing data gathered in studies of three different “news breaks,” the authors describe apparent regularities in the diffusion process and note differences in the functions of the newspaper and broadcast media. Other findings suggest that person-to-person “relay” may be of limited importance.

Living as we do in the midst of a "communication revolution", we are constantly reminded of the increases in the means of communication. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of this revolution has been the multiplication and improvement of ways of delivering a message from one human to another. In the United States, for example, there have been manifest changes in the methods of communication in the postwar period. The ubiquitous use of television-if not its effect-is obvious. There have been other postwar changes, less noticeable but of great importance, in the expansion of the magazine medium and the development of the book as a mass medium.The communication revolution is not confined to the United States. It is going on around the world. Increasingly, it is becoming difficult to find a culture which is dependent solely upon oral, face-to-face communication. Primitive and underdeveloped states are moving toward what Daniel Lerner calls "media systems" of communication. As he notes, the movement is one-way. There are no cultures moving in the opposite direction.Changes are not restricted to the mass media field. One of the aspects of the revolution is the development of "communications" machines. The whole range of developments in the computer field has many links to the study of communications. For example, one is provided by the attempts to develop machine translation devices, which seem closer to realization every day. Another link is provided by the recent completion of a concordance of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas-by the use of IBM machines. Thus machine communication is helping the man "here" to talk to the man "there", despite differences in tongues. And it is helping the man "now" to communicate with the man "then"4espite differences in times.

Even at the low development level of a small Andean village, there are persons receiving messages from the modern mass media. The study suggests that the process of media audience building may be fundamentally the same in this quite different culture as in the United States.

Interviewers find the daily mass communication intake of Latin American professional and technical people roughly on a par with, and in some ways broader than, that of comparable North Americans. Domestic and foreign media consumption patterns are analyzed in terms of education and U.S. exposure.

The authors have made a statistical construction of the "average" Latin American country. Factor analysis produced three central indices—Size, Developmental Level, and Exports to the United States—which account for considerable differences between nations. Similarities in certain of the 16 basic factors, such as literacy, are also pointed out. Paul Deutschmann, who died unexpectedly last year, was Professor at Michigan State University, and one of the finest and most cordially liked younger scholars in the field of journalism and communications research. Professor McNelly is at Michigan State, following an extended period of research in Latin America.S statistics of national states increas-A ingly become available it has been observed that there are a number of significant relationships between some of them. For example, Lerner, using UNESCO data, showed, that literacy and percent of urbanization were highly related around the world, and that media development also related to these two concepts. McClelland also has shown that a measure such as electrical power consumpiton is highly related to national income and other development indices. A more recent study is that of Gibbs and Martin.'The present investigation was designed to examine a number of such national indices for 20 Latin American countries, to determine the degree of intercorrelation among them, and to determine by an approximation to factor analysis how many different aspects of these nations they tell us about. In addition, we will analyze the pattern of interrelations for particular variables of special interest. Such analysis is dependent upon the quality of statistics used,2 but not to as great an extent as we might expect. Interrelationships which are very strong will emerge even if there are fairly substantial &dquo;errors&dquo; in the figures for several nations. To the extent that there are random errors, they can only serve to reduce relationships. Systematic errors, such as could arise from the utilization of some indices to estimate other key figures, can on the other hand introduce correlations which might be spurious or artificial. These two forces, of course, are working in a countervailing fashion-the one to increase, and the other to lower the estimates of the &dquo;true&dquo; relationships between variables.We have chosen to work with the 20 They tend to have a common historical and language background, with the exception of Brazil and Haiti. All are independent national states.Since we are working with a relatively homogeneous region in terms of backgrounds, we may well expect stronger relationships than have been developed in other similar studies which have utilized states from various part of the world with quite divergent cultures. On the other hand, despite the homogeneity of background for the chosen set, there is a considerable range in most of the indices in which we are interested, another factor necessary to produce some magnitude in correlation.In Table 1 we present the 16 indices which were used and three m...