ABSTRACT . This article explores the role of location formulation in the expression of nationhood in six Scottish newspapers’ coverage of a domestic political event. The article draws upon a corpus analysis comparing the incidence of ‘location lexical tokens’ in the Scottish papers with a selection from the UK and England. It finds that the Scottish papers stress the national character of the political process, occasionally doing so alongside an inclusive rhetoric. The article also finds that the Scottish papers mobilize an internal political vocabulary around the expression of location, manifest in the widespread adoption of the political metonym ‘Holyrood’ for the Scottish parliament, and in the use of localized political discourses. The article therefore suggests that explicit reference to the home nation is an important component of news discourse, and that the systematic study of location formulation also offers an insight into the generation of an internal and nation-specific political vocabulary. KEY WORDS : banal nationalism, common sense geography, devolution, location tokens, metonym, national identity, news discourse, Scottish press Introduction It has become commonplace to share in Kedourie’s (1966) idea of the nation as an invented doctrine. Looking to any of what Smith (1998) describes as the modern nations of western Europe and America, it is curious that so many of their occupants submit to their national identities with no more critical reflection than they devote to why they should have fingerprints. Indeed, according to Billig (1995), far from being confined to occasions of extravagance and celebration, a widespread acceptance of national belonging forms part of the ‘endemic con- dition’ of the western mindset. Thus, according to Billig, the nation survives not by the sporadic, dazzling intrusion on the senses, but in the provision of the dulled ARTICLE 633 Putting the nation in the news: the role of location formulation in a selection of Scottish newspapers MICHAEL HIGGINS TRINITY AND ALL SAINTS LEEDS Discourse & Society Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 15(5): 633–648 10.1177/ 0957926504045035