JOURNALISM: CALLING, CRAFT, PROFESSION

The multidimensionality of the functioning of the media, the lack of clearly defined boundaries of their influence, the diversity of activities of employees of newspapers, magazines, television and radio studios give rise to the opinion that journalism is not an independent profession. It is called subprofession, quasi-profession, occupation, craft, vocation, not needing education and special knowledge. There are other, directly opposite points of view, according to which journalism requires special training, broad knowledge, skills, possesses certain organizational characteristics and is aimed at serving the community, which means it has all the signs of a profession.

Indeed, journalism implies a greater or lesser coordination between the needs and expectations of society from the media, on the one hand, and the professional readiness of a journalist to implement these requests, on the other. The movement of the journalist and society towards each other is full of dynamism, difficulties, contradictions. Being a public activity, the press "draws" everyone who has tied its own fate with it into an extensive system of social relations. In their context, the abstract scheme of the profession is specified, acquires a multidimensional character. Writer and journalist M.S. Shahinyan said: “Working in the newspaper became for me a means of constant live participation in the events taking place ...”

According to American authors, the editorial staff truly felt themselves to be professionals in the first decades of the 20th century. At the same time, intensified the search for a model capable of absorbing the most important in professional practice: from work to the sense of responsibility. This model combines stable elements (they give it qualitative certainty, stability) and flexible, variable components depending on the circumstances of the place and time, objective and subjective factors.

Among the leading, systemic features of the journalistic profession are the following: functions, the predominant species; type, characteristics, object and conditions of activity; types of contacts and ways to interact with the audience; reflection objects; system of information sources; mode and rhythm of labor [11]. These aspects of the topic will be discussed in this section of the textbook.

Most of the designated parameters that form the “framework” of the profession are in one way or another connected with the concept of activity — a specifically human form of attitude towards the world around us, aimed at its expedient change.

An activity approach to the profession of a journalist is fundamentally important for several reasons. Activity is inseparable from consciousness - the highest level of perception and understanding of reality by man. Consciousness is a state in which we are able to describe in words, to represent our sensations, feelings, thoughts with deeds or images. In the developed consciousness, sensual images are melted into values ​​formed under the influence of social practice. Personality always correlates meanings with its needs, and hence biasiness of consciousness arises. Outside of these processes, journalism is unthinkable: with an “idle” consciousness, higher forms of intellectual and moral behavior are violated.

In the course of activity, a person begins to distinguish himself from others, his self-consciousness is formed, and opportunities are being understood. He sets goals, sets goals, and anticipates the results of his activity in the individual and social dimensions. The activity approach allows one to understand more deeply the subjective side of journalism, the harmony of its creative and non-creative principles.

It is known that the concept of creativity is interpreted differently by scientists and artists; in its most general form, it is the appearance of the new in any area of ​​human practice. Creativity is manifested in those situations where a person himself, without precise instructions, decides how to act. In this case, journalism is permeated with creativity: the media employee has to make decisions in specific conditions, sometimes refuting schemes that were previously stable in social practice and in public consciousness, do not fit into our everyday experience. Petersburg journalist T. Zazorina, when the press was not allowed to report non-statutory relations in the army, overcame more than one obstacle, went through dozens of cabinets to print her interview in the Leningrad regional newspaper Smena. This material has opened up a grave social problem for the Soviet press.

But the work of a journalist is professional, that is, subordinate to specified algorithms, dependent on knowledge, training, practical skills, corporate traditions. For a newspaper worker (as well as for any other specialist), experience in solving similar problems is necessary, which allows saving time and saving time and avoiding common mistakes. One of the classics of national journalism M. Koltsov advised his comrades in the workshop: “The thing must be designed firmly so that, after reading it, the person ... sees where the beginning is, where the end is, exactly how this paragraph ... has something in common with the other paragraph at the end. Especially on that short platform, which is usually given ... in the newspaper and in the magazine ... "

Stable and innovative in journalism are in a state of mutual transition, interaction. The constant desire to create a new, original is inseparable from the implementation of hard duties, tasks, and in a clearly defined chronological framework.

The peculiarity of journalism lies in the fact that it, and consequently, those who work in the media, actively participate in socio-cultural creativity. The most important task of the journalist is the change and development of cultural elements, the creation of its value-normative coordinates, the "cultural equipment" of social processes.

Does journalism belong to the category of “intellectual” professions or is it a myth of traditional Russian consciousness that continues to stubbornly defend the idea of ​​a genetic link between journalism and intellectuals? The modern cultural science helps to resolve the dispute: it distinguishes between the managerial, scientific, artistic, and military intelligentsia, as well as the humanitarian, to which it includes teachers, doctors and journalists.

When identifying features of editorial work, it is necessary to take into account the concept of unity of communication and activity developed in Russian psychology. Communication is the content of mass communication, which

Ø carried out in large social groups;

Ø possesses special channels;

Ø operates with certain sign systems;

Ø differs in the “delayed” nature of feedback.

For journalism, mass communication is the main field of its functioning. Greater or lesser spatial and temporal remoteness of the author from the reader, listener, viewer is a distinctive feature of journalistic communication with the audience, but not depriving the profession of its human-oriented meaning. As part of the culture, the media is designed to promote understanding and communication between people.

How does the communication through the media? Compare the two schemes. The model of the media system includes information sources, a journalist, messages, information channels, and an audience. The model of the communication process is as follows: social reality - communicator – revision – text – audience – transformed reality. One can clearly see the coincidence of the main components: the main figures in either model are the journalist (editorial) and the audience (readers, viewers and listeners), whose communication is impossible without text.

The concept of text in relation to journalism may refer to a publication in the press, television and radio programs, a message transmitted over a computer network. Initially, journalism was associated with a written text that is verbal in nature. By the end of the 20th century, profound qualitative changes took place in it. It seems that it has risen to the next round of the spiral, which in a new way reflected the syncretism of that distant era, when information processes were only beginning to fill with human and social meaning. Today, the mass media relay not only the word, but also images and symbols, that is, the type of signs that prevailed in the communication space of ancient civilizations.

The textual reality of modern journalism has become more complicated: it is not limited to the transfer of verbal information. Today we are faced with macrotext, combining verbal, acoustic and visual messages. An oral text was returned to the media, which was once the exclusive belonging of rhetoric. Photography is spoken of as a narrative in visual imagery. The “soft” text of a computer, constantly ready for transformation, focused on the “second” subjectness, that is, on the world of computer networks, data banks, and so on, also begins to affect production and creative processes in the mass media. The notion of hypertext based on retreat has appeared on the Internet, which can have many authors equally involved in the creation of a work.

Despite the diversity of types of texts, they all have common features. These texts

Ø reflect the world of social reality and the creative self of the journalist,

Ø bear the imprint of the source of information

Ø created taking into account a communication channel,

Ø obey the professional criteria developed by the team where the author works.

With regard to the media, they usually mean individual texts (works) and their totality (newspaper, television program, etc.). The social content of the text is, as a rule, due to its relevance and novelty, meeting the needs of the audience, the depth of analysis of social reality, the advanced formulation of socially significant problems, the presence of ideals and socio-political guidelines, the perfection of the presentation form.

The “life” of a journalistic work reflects the specifics of the process of mass communication. The social reality, refracted in the mind of the correspondent, is reflected in the text, which, before reaching readers, listeners, and viewers, passes through the editorial filter and only then is “consumed” by the audience.

Social information returns to reality, causing changes in the spiritual sphere and in the behavior of individuals and groups. Despite the seeming dissolving of the publication in those arrays of information that circulate through the channels of mass and interpersonal communication, it exerts its influence on society and on the person, on the thin and fragile structures of his inner world. Therefore, professionalism includes the ability to anticipate the results of a newspaper, television or radio correspondent. The publicistic forecast can get social sounding. An example of this is the books of the famous Soviet journalist Ernst Henry (S. Rostovsky) “Hitler over Europe?” (1934) and “Hitler against the USSR?” (1936): the publicist foresaw not only the events and their outcome, but also foresaw details that astonished historians.

A number of factors negatively affect the journalistic text: pressure on the mass media of private groups and individuals, the subordination of the mass media to the state apparatus, their involvement in the service of political elites, the development of journalism’s “self-sufficiency”, the emergence of “journalistic egoism” - aspirations of the press, radio and television their materials are not the surrounding reality, but themselves. The daily routine is supplanted from the text, it turns into a “custom-made” one, written according to someone's assignment and, accordingly, paid, the watershed between the fact and the opinion acquires a very unsteady outlines, and advertising begins to invade it.

The journalistic work is based on facts and events of social reality. But the social fact passes a difficult way of synthesizing the objective and the subjective, before becoming a fact of journalism. The ability to convey the social value of the material to the audience is one of the criteria for professionalism. For this, it is necessary not only to select typical facts, but also to “translate” information into such a language of communication, so that the reader, listener, and viewer adequately perceive it. At the dawn of the history of journalism, the great English writer, publicist, editor D. Defoe considered the perfect literary style, with which the author, appealing to hundreds of readers (different in their abilities and position in society), can be understood by everyone, except for lunatics and idiots .

Orientation towards the audience is not a moment external to the text; it is organically incorporated into the structure of the material. The purpose “for all” gives the text an integrative character, the calculation for one or another group is differentiating. Texts can be neutral or, conversely, cause an appropriate reaction from social institutions and mass audiences.

Creating a text requires the author to have perfect knowledge of the language of the information system in which this text will exist, penetration into the poetics of journalism, and acquaintance with a wide range of aesthetic traditions. The social component of the text and its formal side are designed to be in harmonic unity. In this sense, journalism is subject to the laws of artistic creation. But since journalism has long since evolved from being an intuitive-handicraft profession into an industrial-technicized one, the role of clichés and standards that facilitate the “conveyor” production and consumption of text increases.

True, modern computer communication is able to return to journalism its “manufactory” character, reviving personal journalism at a new technical level. Already, there is an opinion that the computer “newspaper”, created by a man not subordinate to political groups or financial magnates, deserves more confidence than its traditional eminent brethren. Whether this becomes a stable trend that will lead us to the triumph of Logos, “logical design”, “method of semantic design of a thing”, or, conversely, its consequence will be an unprecedented scale of replication of ready-made schemes, time will tell.

The increasing production character of journalism, of course, has its own costs, distorting the social meaning of the profession. Thus, a journalist who has abstracted himself from the sociocultural content of his activity may turn into a “sensor” - an intermediary between the source and the recipient of information. “He is clearly not an intellectual, as he lacks the depth of knowledge and the rigor of approach to this information, sometimes it turns out to be simply ignorant. However, in the eyes of the average person, he is surprisingly similar to an intellectual due to the fact that he has an abundance of information that is confused with knowledge and which he is able to share ”[12]. The significance of the “sensor” as an author disappears; it dissolves in information without penetrating into its essence and turning into a processing machine.

In this case, the question is fair, will not a computer, trained to compose poetry, write music, make literate informational messages, be a more effective participant in mass communication than a person who is clearly inferior to him in speed and volume of information operations? But, although practicing journalists and theorists express concern that, under the pressure of a computer, a human artist is gradually being squeezed out of the process of disseminating visual information, that in the electronic press new texts are sometimes synthesized based on those already published and, as a result, the creative content of journalistic activity, human personality in all its originality has not yet found a worthy replacement in the guise of a universal biorobot, about which science fiction writers write.

Of course, in the journalism of the XX century. There have been changes, the requirements for computer literacy journalist increased. The ubiquitous computerization even caused the editorial staff to be less tempted to go to the scene, being satisfied with their electronic version. However, if mass media workers are viewed as a relatively homogeneous professional community, which obeys professional qualification requirements concerning ideological, moral, business, characterological, and physical qualities, it will become obvious that the journalistic profession starts with a person. It is the individual who can “get used to the external human world”, settle “in him with the help of individual abilities”, be with him “not only in constant but also active interaction” [13]. The active interaction of the journalist with social reality is one of the main features of the creative content of his profession.

The journalist’s introduction into the world of people is expressed in different ways, but, as a rule, it is not limited to preparing your own text. Например, в работе печатных средств массовой информации устойчиво повторяются такие основные типы профессиональных действий, как руководство редакцией, отделом, подготовка собственных материалов, работа с авторами и редакционной почтой, правка чужих материалов, макетирование газетных полос, прием посетителей, выступления с обзорами публикаций на планерках и летучках, участие в организационно-массовых мероприятиях. Этот «набор» подтверждает индивидуально-коллективный характер журналистской профессии.

И индивидуальные, и коллективные компоненты профессиональной культуры журналиста , подчиняющиеся стандартам и образу трудового поведения, так или иначене являются отстраненными от человека. Человек вносит в профессиональную деятельность содержание своего внутреннего мира.

Как и многие другие категории, понятие «внутренний мир» истолковывается по-разному, иногда оно обозначает человека как живое существо в целом. Если рассматривать проблему внутреннего и внешнего в их соотнесенности с личностью, то можно прийти к заключению, что внутренняя жизнь человека обусловлена как врожденными качествами, так и средой, его окружающей. Внутреннее и внешнее не отделены друг от друга непреодолимым барьером: их взаимосвязь проявляется прежде всего в деятельности, в процессе которой человек способен достичь самоактуализации – максимально полного выявления своих творческих возможностей.