Issue

Content:

• New Media

  «PRC’S Digital Diplomacy in Social Network Accounts of Chinese Embassies in Africa»

  Since Xi Jinping became President, China has been trying to improve informational and ideological support of its foreign policy by different means, including digital diplomacy. Focusing on China's digital diplomacy in Africa, the authors of this article analyze which ideas and in what way Chinese diplomatic missions seek to convey to foreign users of social media. The empirical part of the study includes a frame analysis of 295 posts published in the social media accounts of Chinese embassies in Kenya, South Africa, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan between 2019 and 2021. In these accounts, Chinese diplomats describe in detail the successes of the PRC and the merits of its development model, strive to popularize traditional Chinese culture, a key element of China's soft power strategy, and aspire to refute accusations and criticisms of China’s foreign and domestic policies voiced by Western countries. Despite the absence of a unified strategy for digital diplomacy development in the PRC, the authors detected the same set of frames in all the accounts under study. This can be explained by the fact that the content of communication to a large extent copies the discourse of Chinese official media and is not largely tailored to social media.
  Keywords: digital diplomacy, global communications, social media, China-Africa relations, frame analysis
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2023.320
  Kirill S. Kravtsov, Elena D. Soboleva 3
• Sociology of Journalism

  «Assessment of the TV Journalist’s Profession by Students Studying TV Journalism»

  In the age of extremes, the global media system faces crucial crises, which concerns all the stages of content production, affects work practices, changes the ways of advertising spending and transforms communicative relationship between journalism and the public. The changing media environment affects first of all traditional media, especially news brands. Radio stations, print media and TV channels are forced to produce and distribute news content via multiple platforms, struggling for life, trying to find new existential meanings by means of profoundly modifying patterns of information consumption. Today it is necessary to examine the dichotomy of using the news, which was revealed during the multicrisis of 2019–2022, when the audience was divided into two parts – “doomscrollers” and “news avoiders”. As a result, understanding the professional roles of journalists and principles of modern newsrooms became complicated tasks. Such a metamorphosis is making pluralization of functions the main characteristic of a job in a newsroom and leading to a shift in perceiving the analyzed specialization. An increasing demand for journalists as writers, videographers, video editors, curators, content creators and bloggers at the same time awakens fear in the new generation. News production is considered by youngsters as an extremely difficult occupation. This study examines Russian students’ attitude to working on TV and uncovers some important problems of higher journalistic education in Russia. In the present article, we tried to find out if there is a threat of the personnel crisis in the TV news industry. Our research draws upon student interviews. A quantitative survey demonstrates how young people, who chose television as a field of study, understand this vocation and highlights that only one tenth of respondents want to make television news after graduation. The main aim of this paper is to analyze what factors have an impact on shaping students’ opinion about modern television. The scientific novelty and relevance of the survey are based on the fact that eventual oncoming employee crises of news television is poorly studied at the moment and a clear description of reasons for the declining interest in TV journalism among students is presented for the first time. The conclusion discusses what exactly could be done by the community of TV journalists and by university lecturers to motivate the youth to become part of the television world.
  Keywords: personnel crisis, television news, higher education, TV journalism
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2023.2141
  Evgeniya L. Proskurnova 23

• «Self-Regulation of Journalism in Russia and China in 1991–2023»

  The article presents the results of studying the practice of self-regulation in Russian and Chinese mass media in 1991–2023. The author carried out an analysis of the evolution of regulation in Russia and China in the period under study and described the features of these processes in both countries. Based on the analysis of the codes of professional ethics, similar features and differences in the values and main provisions of the Media Ethical Standard 2.0 (Russia, 2021) and the Code of Professional Ethics (China, 2019) were identified. A case study of the activities of the Russian and Chinese organisations revealed a difference in the mechanisms for implementing self-regulation, which is accounted for by the national specifics of the development of these institutions in Russia and China.
  Keywords: professional ethics, media ethics, Russian journalism, Chinese journalism, self-regulatioin
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2023.4265
  Wang Fang 44
• History of Journalism

  «V. L. Pushkin in the Vestnik Evropy Journal in the Early 1810s and His Booklet “About Carousels”»

  The article considers the relationship between an active adherent of the Karamzin “party” V. L. Pushkin and editors of the Vestnik Evropy journal in 1810–1811. The authors’ aim is to clarify the strategies of different participants in the literary struggle of that time and to describe the new challenges for them. Pushkin's booklet “About Carousels” is analyzed for the first time in connection with its function of “PR support” for the 1811 Moscow carousel and also two reviews of this booklet by M. T. Kachenovsky. It is claimed that not so much the consensus rejection of Pushkin’s anti-Shishkovist epistle “To V. A. Zhukovsky” by the co-editors of the journal in 1810 Zhukovsky and Kachenovsky, but just Kachenovsky’s criticism of Pushkin’s booklet for the amateurish mythologization of history and the “party” bias in the presentation of V. P. Petrov’s “carousel” ode determined the termination of Pushkin’s participation in Vestnik Evropy until 1814, when V. V. Izmailov, the follower of Karamzin, became editor of the journal.
  Keywords: V. L. Pushkin, Vestnik Evropy, V. A. Zhukovsky, M. T. Kachenovsky, anti-Shishkovist epistle “To V. A. Zhukovsky” (1810), information and advertising booklet “About Carousels”
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2023.6683
  Irina E. Prokhorova, Aleksandra K. Korobova 65

• «Gogol’s Death and the Serbian Press»

  The article deals with the obituaries for Gogol, published in 1852 in the Serbian press. After the death of the writer, Srpske Novine (Serbian Newspaper) promptly reported in a short message about his death, and three months later a detailed obituary for the writer was published in several issues, from which Serbian readers learned a lot about both the life and work of Gogol. This obituary not only fixed a certain image of the great Slavic writer in the memory of contemporaries, but also raised the question of the world recognition of Gogol and, more broadly, of Russian classical literature. It was in this way that the process of perpetuating, building up symbolic capital (P. Bourdieu) and the subsequent cultural canonization of Gogol was launched. In this sense, Gogol’s obituary in Serbia can be considered the starting point for the entry of the Russian writer into the national literary canon.
  Keywords: Gogol, Serbian literature, obituary, Russian-Serbian cultural relations
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2023.84103
  Egor V. Sartakov 84
• Essay

  «Rodolfo Jorge Walsh: the Testimony of the Time and the Current Narrative Strategies of Literary Journalism»

  The purpose of this paper is to examine the literary experience, text models, and overall contribution of the Argentine journalist and writer Rodolfo Jorge Walsh to the formation of “new journalism”. The narrative strategies elaborated by the author in his articles written in 1966-67 and his testimony novel “Operation “Massacre”, which determined the further development of narrative journalism in Latin America, are considered. Reminiscences of Walsh's journalistic texts to works of both Latin American and world fiction (Horacio Quiroga, Esteban Jose Echeverria, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas de Quincey, Ernest Hemingway) are identified. The authors of the paper proved that the principles of creating highquality content in journalism, developed by Walsh, are still in demand and acquire a new resonance in the conditions of an overabundance of information. They also demonstrated that the search for new narrative strategies and the most adequate genre forms is associated with the ethical positions of journalists, with their willingness to reveal the real background of events.
  Keywords: new journalism, narrative strategies, chronicle, testimony novel, genre hybridization
  DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.4.2023.104127
  Veronica M. Sokolova, Elena V. Koreneva 104