This article examines the role of journalism in constructing generational labels - such as the Baby Boom, Generation X, Generation Y and the ‘Greatest Generation’ - and in articulating their meaning over time. Through narrative and rhetorical analysis, it examines 20 years of cover stories about generational identity in leading American newsmagazines. The study contends that, even while they situate particular people within particular historical contexts, such ‘special reports’ employ common narrative devices and themes of youth and nostalgia, blending the stories of individual groups into broader notions about generational and national identity. This kind of reporting extends journalists’ cultural authority and is a matter of memory as well as ‘news’, offering not just definitions of current social identity but also future understandings of a shared past.
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