Manuel Menke

Convergence has had a major influence on journalism in the pas decade. It is particularly important to understand how convergence continues to change working conditions as well as the journalistic practices, routines, norms, and strategies that shape news production. This phenomenon becomes even more substantial when considering the extent to which technological and economic changes have had a disruptive impact on journalism, altering how news is produced and circulated to increasingly fragmented audiences (Picard 2014; Spyridou et al. 2013). Under these ever-changing conditions, journalism must adapt to alterations resulting from convergence processes in order to remain a relevant authority on information and orientation in a digital media environment increasingly populated by non-journalistic actors, who compete for the “collection, filtering, and distribution of news information” (Lewis 2012, 838).

It is an old, yet, accurate observation that the ‘newness’ of media is and most probably will continue to be a catalyst for research in media and communication studies. At the same time, there are numerous academic voices who stress that studying media change demands an awareness of the complexities at play interweaving the new with the old and the changes with the continuities. Over the last decades, compelling theoretical approaches and conceptualizations were introduced that aimed at grasping what defines old and new media under the conditions of complex, disruptive media change. Drawing from this theoretical work, we propose an empirical approach that departs from the perception of media users and how they make sense of media in their everyday affairs. The article argues that an inquiry of media change has to ground the construction of media as old or new in the context of lifeworlds in which media deeply affect users on a daily basis from early on. The concept of media ideology (Gershon, 2010a, 2010b) is used to investigate notions of ‘oldness’ and ‘newness’ people develop when they renegotiate the meaning of media for themselves or collectively with others. Based on empirical data from 35 in-depth interviews, distinct ways how the relativity but also relationality of old and new media are shaped against each other are identified. In the analysis, the article focuses on the aspects of rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions as well as on media generations, all of which inform media ideologies and thereby influence how media users define old and new media.

For two decades, convergence culture has been an important motivator for change in journalism worldwide. Journalism research has followed these developments, investigating the dimensions of change that define convergence as a cultural shift in the newsroom. Research in the European context has mostly been comprised of national case studies of flagship media outlets whereas comparative, let alone quantitative, studies are scarce. In response to these shortcomings, we present a comparative survey among newspaper journalists in managerial positions on convergence strategies in newsrooms from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, and Portugal.

Results show that there is still a dominant print culture present in newsrooms across Europe; however, a shift toward convergence journalism is evident in the strategic implementation of editorial routines and practices as well as in the encouragement of journalists to join convergence developments. Furthermore, newsrooms in Mediterranean countries are more advanced than those in North/Central Europe when it comes to embracing convergence culture because of a stronger audio-visual than print news tradition and a higher motivation among journalists. Our study reveals that after two decades of European convergence journalism, cultural change moves slowly but steadily toward a news production that makes use of the possibilities emerging from convergence.

This article presents an empirical analysis and theoretical reflections on the negotiation of memories in hyperconnected memory cultures. In order to describe the conditions of memory negotiation, we suggest using the notion of ‘hyperconnected memories’, which refers to the mediatization of memory in a nexus of contingent forms of communication. By conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we show how the Soviet past is negotiated in contemporary Russia and analyse how national identity is discursively constructed alongside official narratives and individual memories. We argue that an important element in this process is nostalgia, which motivates people to join mnemonic online communities but also functions as an intermediary between cultural memory and national identity by making history a personal, sentimental matter. However, we will also demonstrate that the negotiation of official history and individual memory in mnemonic online communities does not automatically lead to emancipation from state-propagated narratives. DOI: 10.1386/macp.12.1.57_1

Nostalgia is often described as a longing for the past by looking at it through “rose-tinted glass” that highlights the past´s positive in contrast to the personal and/or societal presence (Wildschut et al., 2006). Research discovered in many studies that engaging in nostalgia is a universal and common emotional and behavioral engagement among human beings and that it has stabilizing psychological effects by romanticizing the past to establish continuity of identity and meaning in life (Davis, 1977; Routledge et al., 2013; Hepper et al., 2014).
Keeping this in mind for communication history research this sounds like a historian’s nightmare. It means that nostalgia is a strong mechanism that interferes with research on three levels:
(1) with the “truthful” documentation of the past by sources, e.g. in ego documents or oral history, (2) with  the “truthful” interpretation of the past by researchers in general and of sources in particular, (3) and with the “truthful” knowledge of history by society
(1) How one remembers the past is tremendously influenced when we take experiences from ego documents or oral history (see Schulze, 1996). Not only do people forget details over time but we also know that reconstructing the past reproduces certain narratives evolving over time and under the influence of nostalgia for the past. In this process we have to recognize that “nostalgia may tell us more about present moods than past realities” (Nisbet, 1972 in Davis, 1977 p. 417) and that these narratives consequently may also tell us a lot about the presence in which they were reconstructed and documented.
(2) Nevertheless, this also means for communication history research that information about the past has to be studied in knowledge of the source´s personal and societal circumstances of documentation. This offers another access to understand history as history of (collective) moods–analogue to a history of mentality (Burke, 1986)–, as well (see Scheve & Salmela, 2014). But it may also lead us to false conclusions about past realities as we know from many experiences in historical research that sources are not mediating the past but one of many (nostalgic) reconstructions of it (e.g. Kinnebrock & Schwarzenegger, 2011).
(3) These sources as well as their interpretation by historians flow back to society at some point by becoming part of school literature, documentaries, stories, and museums acting as agents in the construction of society’s collective memory of the past. Nostalgia shapes this collective memory in its production as well as in its reception of society´s narratives about the past (see Niemeyer, 2014; Erll & Nünning, 2008). As an outcome, we see people´s nostalgia unfold in many ways in forums, facebook groups and face-to-face discussions which offers insight into the role of nostalgia in processes of (collective) identity and memory building as well as its institutionalization in private and public communication (Kalinina, 2014).
Therefore, we want to discuss with the participants of the round table “Sources and Methods” why nostalgia needs to be investigated further to reveal its mostly hidden influences in communication history research. Therefore, we will discuss not only the three aspects mentioned in this paper but also our methodological experiences in doing quantitative and qualitative research on nostalgia and the difficulties that come with attempts of grasping it.