Making Risk Proximate: Collective Memory and Anticipatory Sense-Making in CNA’s Early COVID-19 Journalism

Journalism studies have often treated proximity in crisis reporting as an objective attribute of events or a situational news value. However, moments of intense uncertainty, such as the early days of global health emergencies, reveal that proximity is not simply “there” to be reported but is actively produced through journalistic practices. Taking the early COVID-19 outbreak as a critical case of journalistic sense-making before dominant narratives had stabilized, this study reconceptualizes proximity as a discursive mechanism through which journalism organizes risk, threat and public health relevance. The study further approaches YouTube as an extension of institutional broadcast journalism within a flatformized media environment. Guided by thematic analysis and discourse analysis, the study examines how CNA, a Singapore-based news outlet, constructed proximity in its broadcast content distributed on YouTube. The findings show that CNA constructed proximity primarily through the invocation of collective memory, linking the emerging COVID-19 crisis to prior regional experiences of infectious disease. By theorizing proximity as a journalistic practice rather than a contextual given, the study advances scholarship on crisis reporting, platform-distributed journalism, and the cultural construction of proximity during public health emergencies.