Barbie Zelizer

This article looks to journalism in order to understand the relationship between memory, mind and media more fully. Using the urgency that characterises the current news environment as a reflection of broader information flows, the article considers journalism's embrace of complex time to address the demands of speed. It suggests that the temporal practices adopted by both individual journalists and the journalistic community offer a model for institutions wrestling with the ontological uncertainty generated by current times, providing mechanisms to navigate and even offset the unending demands of simultaneity, immediacy and instantaneity.

This article addresses the relationship between digital technology and journalism, arguing that defining journalism in conjunction with its technology short-circuits a comprehensive picture of journalism. Not only does it obscure the incremental nature and detrimental effects of change in journalism, but it sidelines the recognition of what stays stable in journalism across technological change. Tracing the advantages and shortcomings of expectations that digital journalism is more democratic, transparent, novel and participatory, the article argues that it is journalism that gives technology purpose, shape, perspective, meaning and significance, not the other way around.

This article considers the ways in which the media apparatuses of Islamic State and the United States have adopted a Cold War frame for covering each other. In so doing, it demonstrates not only the degree to which U.S. news provides a template for news crafted elsewhere, but also how the past undergirds the present in unknowing and often unpredictable ways.

This article argues that media events can be fruitfully understood as an exercise in collective memory. It considers how coverage of the so-called war on terror draws from a deep memory of the Cold War. In drawing from that mnemonic scheme, terror’s current representation as an ideological war prosecuted patiently across time assures its seeming success even when its main media events underscore the war’s failure.

This epilogue argues that time matters in journalism’s operation but is not sufficiently considered in its study. It focuses on the temporal expectations associated with the digital environment, highlighting problems with an overemphasis on the present in studies of news production, a lack of temporality in discussions of news engagement, and a failure to consider the temporal depletion associated with journalism’s future.

Scholarship on journalism has long privileged a journalistic world that is narrower than that which resides on the ground. Perhaps nowhere is this as much the case as with the placement of democracy in discussions of the news and the role it has played in driving and shaping journalism scholarship. This article argues that democracy has long occupied a more central role than it deserves when considering the news, and that its centrality primarily in western scholarship has negatively impacted existing understandings of journalism in their broadest possible parameters. Maintaining that democracy in journalism scholarship has over-extended its shelf life, the article calls for a retirement of the concept as a key term for understanding journalism.