Issue

Content:

• Sociology of Journalism

  «Media System in the Context of a Region’s Development: an Econometric Analysis»

  This paper presents the results of a research into the media systems of modern million cities in the context of major demographic, economic and socio-cultural characteristics of regions and endogenous media properties of print publications. The research conducted by the Faculty of Journalism of Lomonosov Moscow State University in 13 million cities examined the structure and typology of 403 newspapers. Using the methods of mathematical statistics and econometrics (in particular, factor analysis), the authors identified the most significant infrastructural and endogenous factors that clearly influence the models, typology, formats and content of the publications.
  Keywords: media system of million cities, factor analysis, newspapers and magazines, typological characteristics of the press
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.330
  Sergei A. Vartanov, Luiza G. Svitich, Olga V. Smirnova, Mikhail V. Shkondin 3

• «The Structure of the Working Process of Russian Radio Journalists»

  The article contains the results of a research into the structure of the working process of radio correspondents and editors. The basis of the research was a written survey of newsroom members of leading talk and news/talk FM radio stations. In total, 43 correspondents and 15 editors from 11 stations took part in the survey. The results reveal that the most time-consuming process in correspondents’ daily work is copywriting (an average of 1.8 hours a day), slightly less time they spend editing materials (1.6 hours a day), while reading media (print and online) and surfing the Internet for information take an average of1.3 hours a day. Visiting events and personal communication occupy, in terms of time expenditure, the last places. Such a distribution of working processes makes it possible to conclude that radio correspondents are mostly focused on copywriting and rewriting. They carry out their work mostly in newsrooms using new technologies and professional Internet sources such as databases, stock reports, government websites for producing fast news. Monitoring newsfeeds, reading media news, talking with subordinates and editing texts are the main routine practices of editors, which emphasizes the managerial nature of their work.
  Keywords: correspondents, editors, newsroom, processes, work structure, convergence, FM-radio
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.3147
  Marina Yu. Galkina, Anastasia Yu. Obraztsova, Andrei V. Vyrkovsky, Sergei A. Vartanov, Alexander V. Kolesnichenko, Sergey S. Smirnov, Irina D. Fomicheva, Mariya B. Vladimirova 31
• Media Language

  «Media Linguistics in Russia: Structure Formation and Development»

  The article presents the formation stages of media linguistics in Russia. To a large extent, Russian media linguistics has been formed as an independent scientific discipline. Both social conditions and internal needs of linguistic science have contributed to its development. This discipline in its modern sense is represented by four analytical vectors (grammar of media speech, media stylistics, media discourse study and criticism of media speech) and is aimed at studying the linguistic architecture of media communication. The diachronic analysis of the development of media linguistics as a scientific discipline shows that the most common method it uses is a praxiological one. Today, the object of its study is the flow of media texts, while the subject can be defined as the implementation of speech activity in mass media in terms of efficiency.
  Keywords: four parts of media linguistics, criticism of media speech, grammar of media speech, media discourse study, media stylistics, praxiological method
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.4874
  Lilia R. Duskaeva 48

• «A Possible Way to Measure Manipulative Capacity of Polarized Political Media Texts»

  Within the realm of modern communication studies, there are numerous works on the tools journalists use to manipulate public consciousness. Far less frequently, attempts are made to create mechanisms to quantitatively express the manipulative capacity of media texts. One of the possible ways to measure the manipulative “charge” of polarized political messages (both online and in print) is substantiated in this article. The author’s approach is based on fifteen parameters, each of which is subject to quantitative measurement in relation to a particular media text. These parameters are (but not limited to): the presence of evaluative statements within headlines and subheadings, balance (i.e. the amount of page space devoted to an alternative view), information sources, the number of emotion-laden words and precedent names, the extent to which the main arguments are well-founded. The article also contains the results of the beta-testing of this evaluation system conducted on the basis of ten online stories from two American and three Russian newspapers. The key methodological limitations of this approach are formulated and further ways to optimize it are outlined.
  Keywords: polarized media text, manipulation, manipulative capacity, mass media, measurement of manipulative capacity, media linguistics, media literacy
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.7593
  Alexander A. Kazakov 75
• Theory of Journalism and Media

  «Multimedia as a Communication Phenomenon: Analysis of Foreign Scholarly Research»

  The article presents a review of foreign concepts and approaches to the multimedia phenomenon. The main method used is the meta-analysis of research papers published in leading English-language scholarly journals over the last 17 years. The sample included 106 papers dealing with multimedia. The author of the article carried out a classification and identified the main scholarly divisions in multimedia research. According to the results of content analysis, empirical articles outnumber theoretical ones. The main research division is represented by case studies of individual media outlets which use multimedia materials. The conclusion of the study is that despite clear evidence of growing interest in multimedia as a communication phenomenon, in foreign scholarly research there is no unified approach to the its definition. The difference between convergence and multimedia has not been fully studied so far.
  Keywords: multimedia, multimedia theory, meta-analysis, Western theoretical approaches, multimedia formats and genres
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.94112
  Diana Yu. Kulchitskaya 94
• History of Journalism

  «On Advertising in the Economy of the Soviet Press under NEP»

  The article analyses the economic aspects of using advertising in Soviet print media in the 1920s. It says that the advertising market destroyed during the Civil War was revived in Soviet Russia with the transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP). On the basis of open sources and archival documents, the author claims that the process of development of the advertising market was not an easy one, it was accompanied by a number of political and economic problems. Nevertheless, by the mid-1920s advertising in the press had become an important economic factor ensuring its profitability. Despite the failure of NEP in the USSR, advertising continued to play a role in the economy of the Soviet media in the 1930s.
  Keywords: advertising, the press, media economy, the USSR, NEP
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.113136
  Maksim I. Babyuk 113

• «The Jewish Topic in the Foreign Russian-Language Press of the 1970s: a Case Study of Journal Periodicals»

  The Russian-language media published beyond Russia have always paid attention to the diversity of existing life. There are many research works dealing with their operation. However, the focus of these media on the ‘Jewish topic’, fairly significant in their content, remains virtually unstudied. The authors of this article bridge this gap to some extent by analyzing the activities of the Russian-language periodicals of the 1970s, when the above topic gained momentum due to an increase in emigration and repatriation from the USSR. Examining the content of such journals as "Noviy Zhurnal", "Posev" and "Kontinent", involved in the coverage of the ‘Jewish topic’, the authors have a chance to evaluate the spiritual state of the emigrant wave at that time.
  Keywords: Russia abroad, Russian-language press, journal periodicals, emigration, repatriation, ‘Jewish issue’
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.137171
  Dmitry L. Strovsky, Alexei V. Antoshin 137

• «Ivelich and Gulliver in the Emigrant Newspaper Vozrozhdenie about Soviet Critic Vyacheslav Polonskiy»

  The article discusses the contribution of Nina Berberova (writing under the pseudonym Ivelich) to the emigrant newspaper Vozrozhdenie at the end of the 1920s. It examines the connection between one of her own works dedicated to critic Vyacheslav Polonskiy and a number of literary articles by Gulliver (the shared pseudonym of Vladislav Khodasevich and Nina Berberova). The author of the article draws some conclusions about the extent to which literary events in the USSR could be understandable to emigrant critics and readers of that time.
  Keywords: Russian emigration journalism, first wave of emigration, newspaper Vozrozhdenie, Nina Berberova, Vladislav Khodasevich, Vyacheslav Polonskiy, Soviet literature
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.172190
  Elena A. Zakryzhevskaya 172
• New Media

  «Cross-Cultural Sentiment Analysis of User Texts on Twitter»

  The paper reviews today’s most successful approaches to sentiment analysis of massive datasets of user-generated texts, including those from Twitter. We define today’s most developed areas of sentiment studies and their limitations, as well as methodological, technological, and other challenges that sentiment analysis faces in its variations across the world. We also group the existing research into clusters based on several criteria, including presence/absence of machine learning, unit of analysis, and object of study. We show that the creation of cross-cultural multilingual sentiment analysis and tools for it is a major task that today’s sentiment studies face; such tools would allow detecting sentiment across a range of languages and cultures. We assess the existing tools for multi-lingual sentiment analysis and suggest a conceptual framework for future studies of sentiment in different language domains of Twitter.
  Keywords: sentiment analysis, sentiment, Twitter, computational social science, cross-cultural sentiment analysis
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.191212
  Svetlana S. Bodrunova 191
• Discussion

  «Science Art as a Media Model of the Possible Future»

  This paper examines the interaction between science, modern art and new media technologies, which generated the systemic phenomenon of science art as an aesthetic form of cyberculture. There is a genetic link between the emergence of science art, new media technology and the evolution of microcultures — stable groups of informal communication. Their interrelations are viewed in the context of systematic representations of interdisciplinary discourse. The media and socio-cultural factors, which stimulated the emergence of science art are also described. The author of the paper stresses the leading role of the scientific and technological revolution and the importance of its semiotic consequences for the emergence of new forms of cyberculture. As a possible interpretation of the term “culture” in the cybernetic aspect, it is a suggested to understand it a source of virtual resources to increase human creative potential. The evolution of cultural forms is presented in terms of conflict of two opposing trends: progress in modern technologies and consequent regression (alienation) of the personality in the industrial environment. The idea of progress determines the optimistic message of this paper. Progress is opposed to regression. Most clearly, the regression trend manifests itself in the dehumanization of relations between the personality and the “system”, as well as in existential protest responses observed on the level of microcultures. An attempt to dialectically synthesize these two trends makes it possible to argue that it is the media dialogue between science, art and technology that suggests the direction of search for a compromise. The concept of science art arising in the dialogue identifies the landmarks in the search space. Apart from the purely aesthetic value, science art has instrumental functions. First, media discourse with the involvement of science art implies the production of new meanings of man’s being in the cognitive pattern of the future. Second, science art serves to eliminate from culture the destructive layers of the outgoing industrial era. And lastly, the works of science art as models of the “possible worlds” appear to possess cognitive and predictive functions.
  Keywords: system, microculture, dialogue, science art, media model
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.213234
  Andrei V. Zamkov 213
• Essay

  «Digital Television in Search of Semantic Prediction»

  The modern information and communication environment has a significant impact on the media structures that are undergoing reform. The global convergence and integration processes result in the transformation of television, which remains the leading means of mass communication, despite the intensity of the Internet’s development and the adoption by consumers of this communication channel. The interest in television in the digital age is explained by both the 80th anniversary of Russian electronic television in 2018 and by its large-scale transformations, when the digitalization of TV served as a herald of the beginning of digital transformations in the sectors of the national economy of Russia, including the transition to digital economy. The article analyzes the stages of the evolution of the technological TV platform, the basis for the operation of this mass medium, which in many ways predetermines the creative opportunities of producing a television product and substantiates the necessity of semantic forecasting of the running order on Russian television channels in accordance with digital requirements. The author discusses the issue of interdependence between TV and screen culture and characterizes the features of screen product production under digitalization, multimedia and virtualization against the background of the immanent “television — audience” connection.
  Keywords: TV broadcasting, digital technologies, screen culture, media reality, synergistic effect, television product
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.235253
  Svetlana L. Urazova 235
• Criticism and Bibliography

  «History of Soviet Journalism: “The Heavy Breath of Time”»

  Book review: Zhyrkov G. V. (2016) Zhurnalistika stalinskoy epohy: 1928—1950e gody [Journalism of the Stalin Era: 1928 — the 1950s]. Moscow: Flinta; Nauka Publ. 504 pp. (In Russian)
  Keywords: review
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.6.2018.254257
  Tatiana S. Tsarkova 254