Writing Individual Journalist's Memories into Collective Memory

This article considers the ways that journalists' personal memories impact on the process of constructing collective memories, while analyzing how journalists mitigate the political, professional, and personal aspects of their lives. It compares the memories of local journalists with the memories of journalists working for national newspapers concerning the same international event, the arrival of the Amelie on Canadian shores in 1987, when 174 Indian refugees spontaneously landed in Charlesville, Nova Scotia (population 77). Personal memories and expressions of forgetting conflict with, or conversely, support, published representations, and allow for an exploration of the impact of personal memories in this specific realm. Power, identity, and emotions are all central to the production and circulation of social memories, as are relationships to places. This article unpacks journalists' personal comments related to forgetting and emotions in order to explore disjunctures which affect the social memories of communities through print media news reports.