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Specific Characteristics of Professional Roles of Journalists in Russia

Student: Semenova Margarita

Supervisor: Sergey Gennadyevich Davydov

Faculty: Faculty of Creative Industries

Educational Programme: Media Communications (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

Research topic: specific characteristics of professional roles of journalists in Russia. The goal of this study is to investigate various professional roles of journalists in Russia by applying the methodology, currently used in the international scientific society. The tasks that we are planning to complete are as follows: Give an explanation to the term “professional role”. Give an account of the way in which professional roles are attributed to the journalists. Follow the history of research regarding professional roles of journalists in Russia. Study the current methodology used for classifying professional journalistic roles. Use this methodology in the investigation of professional roles of journalists in Russian internet media. Find and analyze the problems of the usage of the methodology appeared during the research in the specified field of internet media. In the course of the study, it was found that all of the following six professional roles of journalists are clearly present to varying degrees in the Russian Internet media: a watchdog, a disseminator-interventionist, a loyal-facilitator, a service journalist, a civic journalist, and an infotainer. However, depending on the media, the representation of the roles differs. In one kind of media, some roles are completely absent and others are pronounced, while in other media, the situation may be reversed. However, in all the analyzed Internet media, there were roles of a watchdog, a service journalist, and an entertainer. The journalists have recognized the watchdog role as the most important for themselves, but it is this role that they perform to a lesser extent than they would like. In addition, although journalists have sufficient freedom in choosing the topics of news items, all of them are influenced to varying degrees by the opinion of the editorial staff. The media audience considers the most important roles to be watchdog, citizen journalist, and service journalist. Both groups of people call the least important role a loyal-facilitator. The audience was also generally dissatisfied with the quality of the performance of all professional roles in the Russian internet media. In the course of the analysis, some disadvantages of the methodology were also identified. First, the indicators of infotainer role were not widely presented, and therefore the journalists who associated themselves with it had difficulties in answering questions. This methodology is more suitable for analyzing business media than entertainment media. However, since the latter also include journalists who perform various functions, it makes sense in future studies to expand the number of indicators to include them in the study. We also recommend conducting a more comprehensive content analysis of the media, which will include a variety of online resources where journalists work, and not just the largest and most popular media. In addition, in the future, it is necessary to continue research, expanding the sample of both media and journalists, in order to obtain more data on journalistic culture. A separate recommendation concerns digital tools. It is necessary to conduct a separate study in the future, the main purpose of which is to analyze the digital elements used by journalists in the preparation and publication of news items and determine their correlation with professional roles.

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