The journalist as memory assembler : non-memory, the War on Terror and the shooting of Osama Bin Laden

News of the shooting by US security forces of the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was broken via the micro-blogging site, Twitter. The event was significant in terms of marking a watershed in the intersecting practices of mobile and social media with journalism, with the Bin Laden story ‘marking a new reference point’ in media coverage (Filloux, 2011). I take this example to show how journalism in relation to memory and to media witnessing in particular now takes place within ‘a globital memory field.’ In addition, I suggest that the use of a range of modalities and points of contact by journalists and non-journalists to report events requires us to recognize the importance of journalism’s ‘incomplete, ambiguous, suggestive and unstable relays to the world’ (Zelizer, 201: 323).