Issue

Content:

• Theory of Journalism and Media

  «Digital Divide, Digital Capital, Digital Inclusion: Dynamics of Theoretical Approaches and Political Decisions»

  This paper examines the key theoretical approaches to studying the problem of the digital divide in foreign and Russian interdisciplinary research. Special attention is given to the transition from viewing the digital divide in terms of access to technological infrastructure to understanding it as a complex social problem. The authors consider three levels of the digital divide model (access, skills and benefits from using digital technologies), analyze the role of legal regulation in the capacity of Russian society to overcome this problem. They draw a conclusion about the importance to understand the digital divide as a complex issue, with regard to specifics of digital capital, digital inclusion and other phenomena on the national and global scale.
  Keywords: digital divide, digital capital, digital technologies, ICTs, Russia
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.329
  Elena L. Vartanova, Anna A. Gladkova 3
• New Media

  «The Role of Social Networks in the Development of Regional Journalism in Russia»

  The article is devoted to local media on social networks and their place in the media landscape and media communication process of Russian regions. Based on an expert survey in twenty regions of the country, the author concludes that professional and amateur media on the Internet perform similar functions, but with different effects. All the respondents highly appreciate the role of amateur media as a source of information and a resource for political technologies, as well as a space for criticism and control of public moods. At the same time, the respondents assess the quality and potential of this resource in different ways, as well as they disagree about the results of the audience‘s criticism of the government‘s actions or monitoring the mood of local communities. Some experts believe that social networks play an important role only during the pre-election period, while others suppose that it is now possible to talk about radical changes in local media landscapes. The degree of professionalization of local media on social networks is also ambiguously assessed: opinions vary from a certain recognition of citizen journalists or bloggers to a pronounced doubt that amateur resources can replace professional media.
  Keywords: social networks, local media, local communities, media landscape, regional journalism
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.3051
  Kamilla R. Nigmatullina 30
• Modern Journalism: Subjects and Issues

  «Journalism and the Blogosphere: Genre and Thematic Intersections»

  The article presents the results of research on how blogs relate to journalism in genre and thematic terms. Content analysis of the most popular Russian-language blogs on five social networks (VKontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter) shows that bloggers practically do not use journalistic genres and the topics of the vast majority of publications do not pass the selection criteria adopted by the media. Blogs are mainly used for self-presentation, audience entertainment, and stories about personal experiences. Socially significant topics are extremely rare in publications, usually they take the form of reprints of news from the media and short comments. All this leads to the conclusion that the blogosphere is much closer to show business than to journalism. Popular bloggers compete with the media for audience attention and advertisers‘ money, but not for coverage of what is happening in the world.
  Keywords: blogosphere, social networks, journalistic genres, criteria for selecting events to cover
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.5275
  Alexander V. Kolesnichenko 51
• History of Journalism

  «Economic Aspects of the Operation of the Russian Telegraph Agency ROSTА in the Conditions of War Communism»

  The article analyses the economic aspects of the operation of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) in the conditions of war communism policies. The author introduces new archival data while briefly describing the structural characteristics of the Agency during this period, as well as outlining the basic economic and financial characteristics of its operation. The article states that in this period the first Soviet news agency relied on state subsidies in its economic activities. Moreover, due to the economic situation in the country, as well as the logic of the political processes, this development model created a lot of problems. The Agency regularly lacked funds and was often provided with resources in kind. Only the transition to NEP radically changed the economic model of the Russian Telegraph Agency development.
  Keywords: Telegraph Agency, ROSTA, Civil War, War Communism
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.76101
  Maksim I. Babyuk 75

• «Genesis of Journalism in Russia: Problems of Identifying the Initial Coordinates»

  The paper presents an approach to the study of the genesis of journalism in Russia. This approach allows to overcome the difficulties of conceptualization of journalism history as a scientific and academic discipline. The author considers as a fundamental difficulty the general agreement among researchers about the obviousness of the initial coordinates of the genesis of journalism in Russia. Hence, the problems associated with identifying these coordinates turn out to be unnoticed. In the study based on the qualitative analysis of textbooks, historical and cultural analysis, and the maieutic method, three main problems are examined. The first one is epistemological: researchers reconstruct not the genesis of journalism as the techno-cultural practice, but the genesis of means of mass communication as its technologies and platforms, and institutions that actualize journalism. The second and the third problems are historical and cultural: most researchers trace this genesis right from the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries when the Russian government began to use the achievements of written and printed culture. Moreover, historians consider the press as a “canonical form” of journalism, and the head of the state as its “official inventor”. The author articulates the 10th and the 11th centuries as the initial coordinates of the genesis of journalism in Russia and differentiates two pre-institutional periods within it. The first one is the becoming of the para-journalistic practice (until the mid-16th century), and the second one is the becoming of the journalistic practice proper (until the beginning of the 18th century). The conclusion of the paper is: any journalism history is based on mnemohistorical reflection, but the latter must be taken under control in order to solve the problems mentioned above.
  Keywords: genesis of journalism in Russia, journalism history, conceptualization of journalism history, narrative on the past, techno-culture, means of mass communication, mnemohistorical reflection
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.102125
  Vladimir S. Varakin 100

• «The Crimean Tatar Newspaper Ak Ses – Golos Pravdy (1918–1919): Ideological and Political Position and Problem-Thematic Identity»

  This article deals with the question of the Crimean Tatar newspaper Ak Ses – Golos Pravdy published in Simferopol in the late 1918 – early 1919 during the second Crimean regional government under the leadership of Solomon Krym. This publication has long been considered lost. It was described by researchers only on the basis of archival and memoir sources and fragmentary references in other media of the period. The authors found the issues of the newspaper for December 1918 and January–February 1919, which gave them an opportunity to solve the problem of incompleteness and inaccuracy of information in Ak Ses. The article reveals the ideological and political position and problem-thematic orientation of the newspaper. It clarifies unique information about its editor and publisher, composition of the authors’ team, structure, periodicity, format, volume, features of distribution and the like. Detailed attention is paid to the newspaper’s participation in the socio-political life of Crimea in 1918–1919 and its controversy with other Crimean publications. The authors of the article conclude that the Ak Ses – Golos Pravdy newspaper took an “above the fray” position: its journalists tried to distance themselves as much as possible from the programs of individual parties and organizations, including the interests of individual leaders of the Crimean Tatar national movement. The problem-thematic analysis of the main publications showed that its authors tried to stop the governmental and societal disintegration, advocated the cessation of the political struggle, in whose aggravation they saw a threat to the development of the state. The newspaper constantly raised the topic of Crimean Tatar education, fulfilling the cultural and awareness-raising mission of the ethnic publication, so important for the local people’s future.
  Keywords: Crimea, Civil War, history of journalism, the Crimean Tatar press, Ak Ses
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.126149
  Natalia V. Yablonovskaya, Leniyara Sh. Dzhelilova 124
• Television and Radio

  «The Cultivation Role of Television in Terms of Violence, Life in General, Personality Traits and the Perception of Old Age»

  Advancing itself to a special and more different place than the previous mass media via its feature of including sound and image, television has been fascinating individuals since the day it first entered their lives. Cultivation Theory enables us to research the effects of television on the perceptions and attitudes of people not only concerning violence, but also various social identities. One main source of the stories told by television is dramas that are very popular among different age groups and different social sections. Turkish series have attracted the attention of not only local audiences, but also reached millions of people worldwide, especially in the Middle East and Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The purpose of this study is to put forth the relation between rates of television watching and the adoption of certain traits presenting a scientific analysis based on the methodology of Cultivation Theory. Message system analysis is based on the television series broadcasted during prime-time on weekdays. Cultivation analysis is based on the Cultivation online survey data conducted with 404 participants. The findings pointed out that television series deliver important messages about human relations and value judgments and there is a positive correlation between the audience’s duration of television watching and the adoption of their value judgments transmitted by television series.
  Keywords: Cultivation Theory, Cultivation Analysis, Turkish television series, Social reality
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.150174
  Hasan Cem Çelik, Seçil Deren van het Hof 148
• Essay

  «Technology of Creating a Negative Image of Donald Trump in The New Yorker Magazine in 2019»

  This paper contains an analysis of stories, articles, letters, photographs and pictures of the American magazine The New Yorker for 2019 which represent a targeted campaign to discredit Donald Trump. It should be borne in mind that today the magazine is published in two main formats: as a traditional paper weekly and as an online publication Daily. In the printed version of the magazine, the presence of Trump‘s criticism was indispensable but not significant: one or two articles, several cartoons, only 1–2% of the text. Here The New Yorker was true to its intellectual and aesthetic traditions. In the online version, however, there were a number of articles and reports against the current president of the United States (up to 10 per day, nearly two-thirds of the columns Reporting and News & Politics). The online version was clearly serving the purposes of political struggle and propaganda. The particularity of this campaign was that its materials were in the tradition of quality journalism, they included a lot of reliable facts, quotes and opinions, but were presented in a completely one-sided perspective and created a negative “framing” effect, which was far from objective. For this, various media and linguistic means were used: caustic cartoons, sometimes on covers, photographs that distorted the appearance of the object and caused laughter or disgust, in the texts – the selection of negative vocabulary, quotes, idioms, comparisons and metaphors, repetition of stamps and clichés of a certain connotation (“liar”, “racist”, “sexist”, “fascist” and the like), the use of sacred concepts and names from national history, on the one hand, and the mentions of odious political figures of our days, on the other, only to emphasize Trump’s negative personal qualities and his inability to fulfill the position. In addition, satirical miniatures by Andy Borowitz regularly appeared in Daily, where grotesque, hyperbole and outright fantasy were generously used. In general, all these materials of the New Yorker magazine against Trump were indicative of the functions of a satirical pamphlet, whose aims are to expose, unmask and ridicule, to overthrow social evil.
  Keywords: The New Yorker, negative image of Donald Tramp, media and stylistic means of ideological framing, satirical pamphlet
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2021.175191
  Pavel V. Balditsyn 168