@article{2013:trmper:sustainabl,
title = {Sustainable Memory},
year = {2013},
note = {This article explores how much attention journalism dedicates to past
disasters in the present media coverage and asks to which extent
journalism refers to present and future developments and concerns
while reporting the past. Following concepts of time sociology and
sociology of knowledge, we suggest overcoming the common assumption
that memory belongs to the past and thus is not in line with the
highly news- and eventdriven journalistic production process. By
introducing the concept of sustainable memory, which covers a temporal
and a thematic dimension, we therefore regard memory as a process in
the present and regard future (and not past) as the epistemological
perspective on memory. These considerations shall contribute to
challenge the inherent contradiction of the news-value topicality as a
code in journalism, on the one hand, and memory as its supposed
adversary on the other hand. We present selected findings from a
comparative quantitative content analysis dealing with the current
media attention for two past storm surge disasters, which happened in
the Netherlands in 1953 and in Germany in 1962 (n=2.799). The results
show that the journalistic memory of these past events is temporally
and thematically sustainable. Altogether, the theoretical
considerations and empirical findings should contribute to a better
integration of memory as a self-evident category in journalism
research.},
journal = {SCM Studies in Communication and Media},
pages = {1--37},
author = {Trümper, Stefanie and Neverla, Irene},
volume = {2},
number = {1}
}