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Why memory's work on journalism does not reflect journalism's work on memory
Barbie Zelizer
Memory Studies 2008 1: 79
DOI: 10.1177/1750698007083891
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Why memorys work on journalism does not

reflect journalisms work on memory
BARBIE ZELIZER, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract
This article discusses the symbiotic, though uneven, relationship linking scholarship on
journalism and memory. Though work on collective memory has yet to recognize the
centrality of journalism as an institution of mnemonic record, memory creeps into journalistic relay so often that it renders journalisms memory work both widespread and
multi-faceted. This renders journalism a key agent of memory work, even if journalists
themselves are averse to admitting it as part of what they do and even if memory
scholars have not yet given journalism its due.

Key words
collective memory; journalism; news

Memory and journalism resemble two distant cousins. They know of each others
existence, acknowledge their shared environment from time to time and proceed apace
as autonomous phenomena without seeming to depend on the other. And yet neither
reaches optimum functioning without the other occupying a backdrop. Just as journalism needs memory work to position its recounting of public events in context, so too
does memory need journalism to provide one of the most public drafts of the past.
Two questions motivate the symbiotic, though uneven, relationship linking journalism and memory. What do memorys journalistic work and journalisms memory work
look like? And why are they not the same?

MEMORYS WORK ON JOURNALISM

To say that memory work depends in part on journalism is to state a truism that should be
obvious to memory scholars though it is not necessarily recognized by journalists. In that
the work of memory draws from a wide range of sources performances, testimonies,

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standards of conduct and material artifacts, to name a few the accounts provided by
journalists constitute an important source of information about practices, issues and
events of a given time period. The relevance of journalists work to understanding the
past, however, is not necessarily admitted by journalists, who neither explicitly speak
of the past nor consider the past as part of their obvious purview. As purveyors of the
present, they tend instead to display both obliviousness and disregard for what is in
effect their unstated role as agents of memory.
Prompted perhaps by journalists ambivalence about their relationship to the past,
journalism is not often cited by scholars as an obvious source of memory work. Many
of the key theorists of collective memory Paul Connerton (1989), Maurice Halbwachs
(1992), Jacques Le Goff (1992), among others did not include journalism in their surveys of what matters in the work of memory. Even Pierre Nora (1997), who devoted
volumes to the study of unusual sites of memory, did not include journalism along his
list of street signs, recipes and holiday rituals. And more recent work on memory
particularly surveys by Jeffrey Alexander (1992), Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1996) and
Jeffrey Olick (1999) implied the recognition of journalists but did not parcel out which
attributes of their treatment of the past qualified as the journalistic work of memory.
What this means is that even today, decades into the systematic scholarly study of
collective memory, there is still no default understanding of memory that includes journalism as one of its vital and critical agents. One of the key lessons of contemporary
memory studies is that vast and intricate memory work is being accomplished all the time
in settings having little to do with memory per se. While the scholarly understanding of
other key institutions religion, the educational system, the political system, to name a
few has produced a picture that includes practices and conventions associated with an
unarticulated but patterned treatment of the past, such has not been the case with journalism.
Though some work has moved in such a direction notably, Schudson (1992,1995),
Zelizer (1992, 1998, 2001), Edy (1999), Huxford (2001), Meyers (2002), Kitch (2005),
Volkmar (2006) not all of it has entered the mainstream of collective memory studies.
Thus, there still remains an insufficiently clear sense of what journalism does with the
past that is different, singular, interesting or problematic.
Part of this disregard may have to do with a lingering presumption that journalisms
treatments of the past are more closely aligned with mainstream historical work than
with memory. In that journalists address to the past by definition runs contrary to their
own concern for the present, journalism at first glance seems an ill-suited setting to
provide a meaningful tracking of the past. For as long as journalism has been around,
the popular assumption has been that it provides a first, rather than final, draft of the
past, leaving to the historians the final processing of journalisms raw events. Against
such a division of labor, journalism has come to be seen as a setting driven more by
its emphasis on the here-and-now than on the there-and-then, restricted by temporal
limitations associated with rapidly overturning deadlines. Journalists distinguish themselves from those dealing with the past by aspiring to a sense of newsworthiness that
draws from proximity, topicality and novelty, and they are motivated by an ongoing
need to fill a depleting news-hole despite high stakes, a frantic pace and uncertain
resources. In this regard, the past seems somewhat beyond the boundaries of what

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journalists can and ought to do in accomplishing their work goals (Zelizer, 1993a).
As Edy (1999: 74) succinctly states:
the fact that news media make use of historical events at all is somewhat counterintuitive. Journalists have traditionally placed a high value on being the first to publicize new information. Extra editions, news flashes, and program interruptions for
important new information all testify to a desire to present the latest information to
audiences. Many stories go out of date and cannot be used if there is not space in
the news product for them on the day that they occur.
Not surprisingly, then, the past is seen as being outside the parameters of journalists
attention, at least in journalists explicit discussion of what they do as journalists.
For their part, historians have generally agreed with journalisms rendering of the
past to others. Often less interested in the variations and contradictions that arise in
the record over time than they have been in securing a durable, accurate and reliable
recounting of the past, historians have valued journalists address to events as a presentoriented treatment. That address has tended to provide, at least explicitly, a durable
record associated with historys first draft and a respect for truth, facts and reality
(Zelizer, 2004b). But although historians regularly rely on news accounts of the past to
establish the facts of what happened in a given time period, even among historians,
journalisms treatments have been suspect (i.e. Nevins, 1959). In short, in many places in
the academy, the its just journalism rejoinder persists whenever journalists voices are
heard (Zelizer, 2004b).
All of this suggests that the particular division of labor by which journalists take care
of the present and historians take care of the past, both sharing a reverence for truth,
facts and reality, has blinded both in considering what else happens when journalists
look backward. That myopic vision has extended in large part to memory studies. Not
only has there been little attempt to single out what is unique about journalism in addressing the days of yore, but discussions of memory have not sufficiently recognized
that journalisms treatment of the present often includes a treatment of the past. Nor
have they accounted for the fact that journalisms treatment of the past tends to be as
variable, malleable and dynamic as other kinds of memory work. Journalism and journalists are an unobvious but fertile site of memory, and their status as memory agents
needs to be better understood.

JOURNALISMS WORK OF MEMORY

What, then, does journalisms work of memory look like? Journalisms alignment with
the past reflects a more complicated dynamic and invested relationship than that suggested by traditional notions of history. Journalists have set their collective recollections
and reconstructions of the past in place by attending to their own agendas. As Lang
and Lang (1989: 126) argued, in journalism:
even cursory perusal reveals many references to events no longer new and hence not
news in the journalistic sense. This past and future together frame the reporting of

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current events. Just what part of the past and what kind of future are brought into
play depends on what editors and journalists believe legitimately belongs within the
public domain, on journalistic conventions, and of course on personal ideologies.
References to the past help journalists regularly make sense of a rapidly evolving
present, build connections, suggest inferences, create story pegs, act as yardsticks for
gauging an events magnitude and impact, offer analogies and provide short-hand explanations (Lang and Lang, 1989). And although much has been made of journalists
so called reliance on the commandment questions of news the who, what, where,
when and how of journalism, with not enough emphasis on the why (Carey, 1986) a
necessary attachment to the explanatory paradigms underlying current events is always
there for the taking in journalism. The past thus remains one of the richest repositories
available to journalists for explaining current events.
What kind of a memory record does journalism provide? The particular rules and
conventions that characterize journalism make it well suited as memory work in certain
ways but limited in others. Drawing from memory and the past offers an obvious source
through which to understand topical events. Practices such as rewrites, revisits to old
events, commemorative or anniversary journalism and even investigations of seemingly
historical events and happenings are regular occurrences in the daily register of newsmaking (Zelizer, 1993a; Edy, 1999).
But when journalists look to the past in telling the news of the present, they strategically weave then and now by combining two strategies: they uphold journalisms reverence for facts, truth and reality while drawing on the singular characteristics of memory
work, as delineated by Zelizer (1995) its processual nature, unpredictability, partiality,
usability, simultaneous particularity and universality, and materality. News stories are
always in process, gravitate toward unpredictability as a criterion of newsworthiness,
are always partial and still unfolding, and are usable to members of the public in different ways. News stories also tend to combine a particular grounding in the details of
a news event with a broader, more universal message. And finally, news stories often
have a material existence, though the nature of materiality is changing in an era of
online news.
In recounting events, journalists deliver news stories by combining content and form
in ways conventionalized by news organizations. By and large, journalists pride themselves on content, first and foremost, following the news story and playing to occurrences that are important, interesting, timely and important, regardless of the form
in which they are told. This has produced a gravitation toward simplistic narratives, a
tendency to record without context, and a minimization of nuance and the grey areas
of a phenomenon, all of which restrict journalisms ability to account for the past. While
the focus on content makes journalisms status as memory work problematic, the forms
of relay that journalists regularly use suggest a picture that is far more aligned with the
work of memory than its content would suggest. In fact, the particular forms of journalistic relay bring memory work directly into the foreground of journalism.
Journalistic form takes on numerous guises in association with the past. In that
the past offers a point of comparison, an opportunity for analogy, an invitation to
nostalgia and a redress to earlier events, journalisms look to the past suggests some

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attendance to memory, though journalists do not insist on or even necessarily recognize

its presence. Once journalists begin to make decisions about which stories play in which
medium and using which tools for relay, they find themselves squarely in the realm of
memorys work.
This makes form a leading sign of memorys presence, even if journalists do not
admit as much. In this regard, the ascendance of the past in journalism enhances the
possibility for journalists to act as sleuths of the past. In events as wide ranging as the
Kennedy assassination (Zelizer, 1992), Watergate (Schudson, 1992), and recollections
of Richard Nixon (Johnson, 1995), journalists are able to accommodate the pasts variations and complications.
Form incorporates memory into journalism in three main ways. At times, the coverage itself is structured formalistically in a way that insists on an engagement with the
past; in these cases, form necessitates memory. Other times, the coverage is structured
in a way that invites engagement with the past but keeps a footing in the present; in
these cases, form invites memory. And finally, at times, coverage includes an address
to the past so as to better treat an event in the past, though such treatment is neither
necessary nor even clear; in such cases, form indulges memory.

JOURNALISTIC FORM NECESSITATES MEMORY

When form necessitates memory, journalists produce obits, rewrites and revisits to old
events as typical of commemorative and anniversary journalism. In such cases, journalists would not have a story were they not to go back in time. Looking backward,
then, is what makes the journalistic treatment newsworthy.
Often news topics look backward simply because attending to the topic forces an
engagement with the past. Obituaries, for instance, are modes of engaging with the
past as a way of coming to grips with the finality of death. Here, journalism is driven
by mnemonic forms that exist because they can easily produce more newswork.
Dependent on periodic reinstatement, these include various kinds of commemorative
discourse, retrospective issues and other modes of anniversary journalism. Special projects produced by news organizations strategically address the past and are produced
for that aim, such as the publication and broadcast of retrospective issues, programs,
special broadcasts, books and volumes that track either a general past as in the state
of a particular news organization, particular news medium or journalism writ broadly
over time or a specific past, as in the coverage of a particular news event or social
issue over time. Meyers (2002), for instance, showed how the news treatments of
Israels national celebrations were shaped by references to earlier celebrations.

JOURNALISTIC FORM INVITES MEMORY

When form invites memory, journalism uses the past so as to engage with the present.
Neither necessary nor central to the journalistic coverage that ensues, journalism in

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this instance produces a variety of journalistic forms that allow for the present and
past to be discussed in some kind of simultaneous relay. Included here would be historical analogues, direct comparisons between present and past, and investigations of
seemingly historical events.
Historical analogies are the most prevalent mnemonic journalistic form, as in Times
labeling of its coverage of the Iraq War as Gulf War II (Zelizer, 2004a) or in discussions of the Columbia Shuttle disaster as a repeat of the Challenger explosion (Edy and
Daradanova, 2006). Kitch (2005) tracked how US magazines recycled celebrity stories
and stories of a certain kind of nation state as the predictable repository of content
across time. Wardle (2007) considered stories of child murder against the historical contingencies that forced a similar story into differential shapes across time periods.
Predictably, the past is at times remembered erroneously. One discussion of the US
coverage of the Vietnam and first Gulf War showed how the news media labeled war
protestors as anti-troop not during the Vietnam War but during the first Gulf War, as
a way of strategically misremembering war dissidence so as to better fit journalistic discussions of the later conflict (Beamish et al., 1995). Visually, journalists played to similar
visual patterns in the representations of events as wide ranging as war atrocities in
Bosnia, Rwanda and the war in Iraq (Zelizer, 1998, 2004a).
Here, much of journalists engagement with the past takes place along explanatory
lines. The limitation of this memory work is that it gravitates to familiar sources and that
the same forms that facilitate memory work also drive it along lines that are familiar
and already known. Journalists make extensive effort to track the past by explicitly
and strategically following journalisms own earlier projects. Grainge (2002) offered
a thoughtful analysis of Times various attempts to track the hundred most influential
people of the 20th century. He found, not surprisingly, that the 100 list read as a particular kind of memory text, a figuration of collective cultural inheritance, which Times
sought to promulgate as a memory of democratic and capitalistic achievement (p.
204). Zelizer (1993b) found that journalists do a kind of double-time on the events that
they report, allowing them to correct in later coverage what they missed earlier: thus,
they adapted earlier reportage of both McCarthyism and Watergate into stories that
better fit their evolving understandings of the events. Journalism tends to produce
mnemonic work through those news organizations with the most extensive archives,
and in this regard certain kinds of news institutions, organizations and individuals are
better attuned than others to be producing memory work. For instance, Kitch (2006)
showed how Time Inc. became a predictable repository for crafting memories of the
past by virtue of its extensive and accessible data retrieval system. Even individual journalists who tend to address the past are those who were themselves involved in the
past being addressed: Dan Rather has been at the helm of mnemonic addresses to the
Kennedy assassination, which he covered as a cub reporter (Zelizer, 1992); the story
of Watergate has been recounted over the years through the celebrated persona of
Woodward and Bernstein (Schudson, 1992). In this regard, then, journalisms memory
is often formulaic and predictable and varies less than one might expect. But this is

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more the case when considering the practices of journalism that are closest to its explicit sense of self; conversely, it is less the case when thinking about the wide range
of journalisms practices, regardless of the degree to which they match journalisms
rhetoric.

JOURNALISTIC FORM INDULGES MEMORY

When form indulges memory, the past is brought into a news story as an aside or
afterthought. Though memory and the past are neither necessary nor critical to understanding the contemporary news story, here journalists produce investigations of the
present that are illuminated by some foray into the past. The inclusion of the past
helps illuminate the centrality that the past plays in helping journalists make sense of
the present.
For instance, while events involving death often themselves make good news stories,
journalists often look to memory when the public needs help in recovering from the
trauma surrounding death. The US response to 9/11, for instance, was crafted in conjunction with the news medias capacity to move the story of grief toward one of
recovery (Kitch, 2003). Similarly, the news medias tracking of the deaths of journalists
killed in Iraq was crafted around larger narratives associated with the viability of collective memory and journalistic professionalism (Carlson, 2006).

MEMORYS WORK ON JOURNALISM VERSUS

JOURNALISMS WORK ON MEMORY
All of this suggests that much work still needs to be done before memorys work on journalism reflects journalisms work on memory. Beyond the question of content, which
will inevitably remain the central draw for journalists addressing the past, impulses of
necessity, invitation and indulgence allow journalism to look backward while attending
to the news relay of contemporary times. Though work on collective memory has yet to
recognize the centrality of journalism as an institution of mnemonic record, memory
creeps into journalistic relay in sundry ways. Each necessitates an address to the past,
rendering journalisms memory work both widespread and multi-faceted. Recounting
the present is laced with an intricate repertoire of practices that involve an often obscured engagement with the past. This renders journalism a key agent of memory
work, even if journalists themselves are averse to admitting it as part of what they do.
This means that we are far from knowing what journalism can tell us more broadly
about how memory takes shape. As journalism continues to function as one of contemporary societys main institutions of recording and remembering, we need to invest
more efforts in understanding how it remembers and why it remembers in the ways
that it does.

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Acknowledgements
Parts of this article will appear in Journalism and Memory, in Vita Fortunait and Elena
Agazzi (eds) Body, Mind, Sociality. Rome: Meltemi, in press (Italian) and Journalisms Memory
Work, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nnning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies. An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook (Media and Cultural Memory VII). De Gruyter: Berlin and New York,
in press. Thanks to Dan Berger for assistance.

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BARBIE ZELIZER is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director

of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the University of
Pennsylvanias Annenberg School for Communication, USA. A former journalist,
Zelizer has authored or edited seven books, including the award-winning
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Cameras Eye (Chicago, IL
1998). A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Freedom Forum Center Research
Fellowship and a Fellowship from Harvard Universitys Joan Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work has
appeared in The Nation, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, Newsday and Radio National of
Australia. Co-editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, she is presently
working on a book on about-to-die photographs and journalism. Address:
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut
Street, Philadelphia, PA 191046220, USA.
Email: bzelizer@asc.upenn.edu

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