Multimedia Genres in Modern Russian Media

Section: Modern Journalism: Subjects and Issues

Multimedia publications make up about a quarter of the content of modern Russian online titles. These are the results of a study into the publications of the 20 most popular Russian media websites. The study was conducted in October-November 2022. 50 publications containing text were selected on the main page of each media outlet's website. Thus, the sample amounted to 1 000 publications. 222 of them also contained multimedia elements. Next, the genre of the text and he form and role of multimedia in the text were identified. The dominant genre of the text was news, which accounted for almost three quarters (73.4%) of publications. The established multimedia genres are as follows: news with a video background, news with a reportage of an event, news with a video quote, news with a video on the same topic, a review with a video review, a review with a video quote, an analytical article with a reportage, video quotes or an analytical video, and lastly an author's column with a video column, where the author voices the text. The differences in the level of multimediation among the media outlets under study are very large: the top three have a share of multimedia publications of 48– 72%, whereas the four outsiders – 4% each. Some media outlets tend to make almost all materials multimediated, while others supplement the text with multimedia elements only on special occasions. Among the forms of multimedia, videos dominate, and, as a rule, they are not shot by journalists of the publication, but received from other sources: press services, social networks and other media outlets. Audios are extremely rare, and other forms of multimedia (interactive infographics, animation, timeline, etc.) are actually not used. With regard to news publications, the text is accompanied by a video that is not related to the topic of the news, for example, "Video of the Day", "The Main News of the Day" or video excerpts such as "What is NATO" or "The Richest People on Earth". This is a consequence of the dictatorship of format and the lack of suitable videos on the topic. In other genres, this is much less common.

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To cite this article: Kolesnichenko A.V. (2023) Mul'timediynye zhanry v sovremennykh rossiyskikh SMI [Multimedia Genres in Modern Russian Media]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 2: 3–22. DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.2.2023.322