Lecture
Genre or text?
Poetics journalistic text has changed dramatically in the 90s of XX century. These changes affected the system of journalistic genres and their use in editorial practice.
The genres of the Soviet press were divided into three large groups: informational - note, interview, report, report; analytical - article, correspondence, letter, press review, review, review; artistic and journalistic - essay, feuilleton, pamphlet. Inside this scheme is its own hierarchy: the leading article is the “flag of the number”, the newspaper did not come out without it, the feuilleton is the “king of genres”, the correspondence is a “piece of life”, etc. Each genre has its place on the newspaper page, its regular appearance: an essay is in the basement of the second or third page, for the holiday, an international review is weekly, an economic one once a month, a press review monthly, a review once or twice a month on the last lane. Political information on the front page, economic - on the second, international - on the third, cultural and sports on the fourth. With a light hand, V.I. Lenin was called a "political newspaper concert" [1]. Each genre “led” its part, speaking in accordance with the regulations of a strictly verified ideological score.
All rehearsed. No gag. It is not surprising that in the forties the word “reporter” was considered abusive in Soviet journalism. The Soviet Press magazine in the fifties led a discussion about this: do we need a reporter? Does his work give bourgeois journalism? After all, he brings in his speech an unhealthy spirit of sensationalism and presupposes an individual look at the event described. The word "sensation" was also considered abusive. Most often it was used in the phrase "bourgeois sensationalism." He squeamishly (and obsequiously) quoted the words of the American press magnate Hirst that if a dog bit a person it was not a sensation, and if a person bit the dog, it was a sensation. The bitten dog became a bogey - a scarecrow of Soviet newsmen.
Post-Soviet Russian journalism is significantly different from its predecessor. Firstly, the journalism, more relaxed in thought and style , has replaced the prescriptive, monochrome ideologized press. Compare:
Our press must comprehensively and deeply disclose the experience of party organizations in managing the economy, boldly reveal the shortcomings, help the party organizations quickly eliminate these shortcomings.
(Commune [Voronezh]. 1965. October 19)
If taxation were a simple matter, then tax inspectors in the USA would not have been taught for nine years. Is it because we do not know how to collect taxes that are badly learned? I have been engaged in the calculations of payments due to the budget for more than 22 years ... I am convinced that it is not income that should be taxed, but income.
(New News. 1999. April 20)
Examples are taken without a long special search, but they are typical. In the first case, the newspaper cares little about the reaction of the audience. And it is not written for the general public - for the regional party committee. In those days, editorials did not read - they were viewed by interested people: who is praised, who is scolded? The text did not correspond to reality: “the experience of party organizations in managing the economy” was well known to citizens standing in line for essential goods, but who cares? The dominant style of journalism of the Soviet period - "must". A verbal cliché (“to fully and deeply disclose,” “to boldly reveal shortcomings”) meant nothing. The second text is the thoughts of a specialist economist. Here there is a link to your own experience, appeal to the experience of foreign, inviting the reader to think, a specific proposal. In fairness, we note that the journalism of the turn of the XX – XXI centuries. owes her pedigree to talented predecessors - Anatoly Agranovsky, Vasily Peskov, Elrad Parkhomovsky, Yaroslav Golovanov, Vladimir Orlov, Evgeny Bogat, Gennady Bocharov, Olga Tchaikovsky ...
Secondly, modern publicism is becoming more and more personalized. The author ceases to be an impersonal repeater of the transmitted information - he becomes more and more clearly its interpreter. The point of view of a particular person is interesting today in itself. This, by the way, is the Russian tradition, coming from the pre-revolutionary period, to listen to the voice of Katkov, Suvorin, Doroshevich, Amphitheatro, Korolenko, Leonid Andreev. Interviews, conversations, columns, comments, letters to the editors testify to the active role of the subject of the statement on the newspaper page. Newspaper headings (“Fact and commentary”, “Telenedelya” by Irina Petrovskaya in “Izvestia”), radio and TV programs (“We”, “Theme”, “Abazhur”, “Man in mask”) strive to assign the right to a person to Media appearances are more personal in nature (Izvestiya emphasizes this fact with design techniques - a photo of the author next to the text).
The personification of the text is brought to life not only by the general process of democratization of the post-Soviet society, but also by the fact that, in the conditions of the current information market, the product becomes not just news, but news “packed” in a journalistic text. The journalistic text, as is known, resembles a double-humped camel: the first hump is a fact, the second is the author's attitude to the fact. The demand for personal journalism in the face of growing media competition has created a precedent of choice. The publicist responds to this demand by offering his own name. The name (in the broad sense of the word) becomes a sign of the publication or channel representing this name: Leonid Parfenov on NTV, Yuri Shchekochikhin in Novaya Gazeta, Alexander Vasinsky in Izvestia ... The name contributes to a dialogue with the audience.
The third feature of the modern Russian press is that it works in a mode of dialogue with the audience. The straight line in "Komsomolskaya Pravda", the "Opinion" heading in "Izvestia", "Letters about how we live" in "New Izvestia", conversations with listeners in the live broadcast on "Russian Radio" - examples are numbers. Dialogue creates polyphony, the effect of subjectivity arises; polyphony of sounding voices offering different points of view encourages the audience to independently determine their own position. Given this, adjusting to the wave of expectations of the audience, the press at the same time focuses on a more entertaining, more ingenious form of presentation. Dialogue with the audience implies its response to the proposed text, interest in it. Interest is possible when the publicist not only offers facts that deserve attention from his point of view, but also informs them in a bright, influencing form to the emotions of the audience.
Even within the age or professional interests of the audience is differentiated. The newspaper can not ignore this circumstance, it tries to look for different intonations in a dialogue with the intended consumers of information. In Moscow, one of the activists of the Jewish cultural center was attacked, and A. Gamow’s material in Komsomolskaya Pravda is devoted to anti-Semitism growing in the society. How to draw attention to the problem, seriously complicating interethnic relations in the country? How to encourage a young reader to read an article raising general questions of the law? Gamow chooses the path of metaphors that contribute to the emotional perception of the text: “On Tuesday, something happened that should have happened sooner or later. The “corpus delicti”, which no one noticed, started off and gains momentum. He is armed and very dangerous. And today, in order to stop him, it is not enough to catch and neutralize the switchman, who has shed the blood of an innocent person. ” Here is both a play with words (“corpus delicti” - “composition has started”) and film associations (a reference to the films “Armed and very dangerous” and “Find and neutralize”), and rethinking of the famous phraseologism (“find the switchman”, that is, the last “Catch the switchman”), and the use of neologism (“underweight” instead of “overgrown”). Appeal to the intellect is one of the effective-active forms of dialogue with the audience.
But options are possible. In the same issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda in an interview with the most famous Moscow waiter B. Kaverin, a journalist, introducing the interlocutor, writes: “People in white vests. Silent, important, it is written on the face that they know everything about everyone, but the figs will say. ” Shuffling the famous cliche “people in white coats”, colloquial “figs will say” - signs of postmodernism in publicism: a shocking, annoying decrease in the level of dialogue. It is assumed that the public is not interested in a person who has really seen a lot in his lifetime - the plain tales told by him about the famous visitors of the restaurant of the Central House of the Actor are interesting. “But do you know what“ grandmothers ”he dug into her? And the eldest brother, Ramil, is now her producer, without him mother Zemfirinatebe not even sneezes about her daughter ... ”- the nameless characters of another publication speak the language of the youth street. “Producer” and “sawed in”, “grandmothers” and “mamma Zemfirina”, “not even sneeze” and “family atmosphere” coexist in it peacefully. “I write with a phrase accessible to the poor,” M. Zoshchenko once said. The editorial board, understanding that the text is a commodity, seeks to take into account all the ways to increase the interest of the audience, including purely stylistic ones.
The fourth feature of modern publicism is the increased role of reception in the processing of material. The text becomes more and more obvious literary: its style changes, the word becomes more expressive, more emotional and witty. The personification of the narrative led to a wider, than before, playing “alien word” (MM Bakhtin), characteristic of artistic speech, to a noticeable expansion of narrative intonations (ironic writing, “banter”, “newspeak”, jargon), to complicate compositional and stylistic structure of materials. The text as a point of view of the individual, as a word belonging to a particular subject of the utterance, becomes more expressive in its verbal content. This remark applies to all genres.
Despite the increased productive employment associated with the war in Yugoslavia, the German Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer did marry for the fourth time last Saturday. The 51-year-old vice-chancellor and the informal leader of the Soyuz 90 / Green Party in Frankfurt am Main entered into a marriage alliance with the 29-year-old journalist Nicola Leske.
(From note)
This process does not occur demonstratively, but as if by itself so it turns out. But the Russian Constitution is no longer quite alike, the laws work in a special way, and even the borders of the region, like a gate in a strong wind, will shut, then open. Guests from the neighboring provinces, if not by arrival - for a day, and delayed a little longer, ask: where are we?
(From correspondence)
The introduction of "mortgage in Russian" into St. Petersburg life is accompanied by drumbeat. The chairman of the supervisory board of the Federal Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending calls St. Petersburg "the cradle of the Russian mortgage", the vice-governor of the city, the chairman of the construction committee - "a testing ground for the federal mortgage lending program." There is nothing to argue about. Unless the cradle is a little expensive and the training ground is extremely dangerous for life.
(From the article)
This is the general trend: wit relies on the search for unexpected solutions to the problems discussed, on the original interpretation of the facts, on introducing the audience into a relatively easily decoded and diverse system of images. We emphasize that the search for an ingenious solution of a creative task contributes to the expansion of the genre boundaries of the material. In essence, all the above-mentioned features of modern Russian journalism are based on the most important process occurring in the press — its essay. In one of his speeches, Grigory Pomerantz called New Time the era of feuilletonism [2]. The turn of the XX – XXI centuries. enters history as the era of journalistic essay: from the personification of the narrative to the transfer of the subject of the utterance to the actor of the historical process is only one step. And this step has already been made. The world and the subject, this world of perceiving, equally become the subject of study. A publicist today feels himself not as an outside observer of the described processes, but as an equal participant in them. The author offers the audience a text that ceases to be equal to the genre.
Comments
To leave a comment
Creative activity of a journalist
Terms: Creative activity of a journalist