50 Years of NPR: Collective Memory, Anniversary Journalism & Public Media

Abstract

As “the first draft of history,” journalism is an essential agent of memory work. Although the relationship between the fields of memory studies and journalism studies has historically been underdeveloped, scholars in both disciplines have established productive and necessary connections between the two. One such connection is the area of anniversary journalism, or current news coverage of anniversaries of past events. Anniversary journalism is also a means by which journalism commemorates itself, particularly through the celebration of institutional anniversaries, and an opportunity for journalism organizations to summarize the past. Using a corpus of nearly 80 articles reflecting on the 50th anniversary of National Public Radio (NPR), the present study employs thematic analysis to examine how NPR engaged with its organizational past and American collective memory more broadly. This study identifies four themes throughout the network’s commemorative coverage: the archive, nostalgia, democracy, and the public. I argue that the series should be understood as an organizational branding initiative that uses collective memory and anniversary journalism as a response to larger transformative change in the journalism industry, and thus, as a strategy to assert the continued cultural relevance of public service media.

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