It has become clichéd to assert that journalists write the first draft of history. Far less attention has been paid to who does the rewrites. Frequently, second drafts of history are also written by journalists. The typology developed here describes the ways journalists use our public past and offers some insights about the process of collective memory development in the news media. Commemorative journalism seems to offer the best chance to reexamine our past, but may offer little incentive to do so. Historical analogies may not encourage us to contest the meaning of the past due to the simple, dramatic narratives of news reporting. Historical contexts may not encourage us to look closely at the meanings we ascribe to the past either, because they are presented as facts rather than interpretations.It has become a cliché to assert that journalists write the first draft of history. Far less attention has been paid to who does the rewrites. Yet this "memory work" is extremely important. As our society continues to dissect itself into small, competing groups, our possession of a past in common may be one of the few ties that bind us as a whole. Collective memory, the meaning that a community makes of its past, is home to critical aspects of political culture, community tradition, and social identity. It informs our understanding of past events and present relationships, and it contributes to our expectations about the future.Frequently, for the narratives of the past that have important impacts on our collective memory, later drafts of history are also written by journalists. The media are unique in their ability to reach huge communities simultaneously. However, like all other narrators of the past, journalists work within the constraints of their profession. If we are to understand how our past is made meaningful for us in the media, and how our political traditions, culture, and identity are handed down to us, we must explore the ways in which journalists use and reconstitute the past. In this essay I develop a typology of the ways in which journalists use history, and explore the implications of these uses for our understanding of our past and future.

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This study examines the validity of newspaper indexes, lead paragraphs, and headlines as representations of full-text media content. We analyze the effects of production decisions on content and categorization in the New York Times Index, based on interviews with its senior editor. We then compare the content of three proxies with that of full-text articles by conducting a parallel content analysis of New York Times stories covering the 1986 Libya crisis and their corresponding Index entries. The study suggests that proxy data can be used to roughly estimate the broad contours of Times coverage but do not reliably represent several key aspects of New York Times reporting. n a recent Workshop article, Woolley (2000) examined the use of media indexes for measuring media attention and counting various types of events. The central concern of Woolley's study was the degree of correspondence between the occurrence of real-world events and media reports of those events, and he found that published indexes of media content suffer from several validity problems when used in event count research (see also White 1993). Another important concern is whether media indexes adequately represent the actual content of the news itself. In this article, we test a common practice employed by political scientists to analyze news content: the use of proxies, such as index entries, headlines, and lead paragraphs, as surrogates for the actual content of the news. Because of time, cost, and access constraints, many researchers code proxies rather than the full content of news texts. Even scholars who ultimately code full text often rely on indirect indicators of news content, such as subject headings in printed indexes and keywords in news databases, to locate that text. Thus, at some level, virtually all content analysis relies on surrogates for full-text content in one form or another. Many important theoretical studies rely on evidence from news proxies, including work on intrastate political conflict (

Collective memory, the publicly shared meaning of a common past, can structure both news stories and reporters' search for information within the broader context of journalistic practices. It can also provide reporters with an independent perspective, balancing elite-dominated news frames. Following the space shuttle Columbia's crash, journalists turned repeatedly to the ‘lessons' of the accident that claimed the Challenger shuttle 17 years earlier both in formulating questions at NASA briefings and in reporting Columbia's destruction and the subsequent investigation in print. In many instances, journalists' reliance on these memories is entirely implicit in the finished news stories, making Challenger a ghostly presence that led reporters to focus on NASA's inadequacies rather than on the mechanical causes of Columbia's demise.