The Journalists’ Day is a ritualized and routine “hot moment” for journalistic community. Using the Journalists’ Day discourse in twelve newspapers of different types during 2000 and 2014 as the object of study, this paper examines how Chinese journalists incorporate “the past” into their discourse about “the present.” Comparing with those “critical incidents” or commemorative occasions, the “memory work” on the Journalists’ Day projects the profession’s deep-seated historical consciousness and collective memory in a more general sense. We contend that journalists rely on common knowledge to situate themselves in a historical context. In this process, they create a “beginning” myth for the holiday, build a “continuous” tradition from the historical “ruptures,” and rearticulate the contemporary relevance and implications of “role models.”