SPECIAL STATUS OF THE JOURNALIST'S COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

In fact, the creative process in any kind of activity is continuous: the information processing laboratory, hidden in the depths of the psyche, does not know peace either day or night. But it produces its products on the mountain portions - individual works. The process of birth of each of the works - the creative act - bears in itself the features characteristic of creativity as a whole, and for a given species.

The main feature of the creative process as such, we already understand: it always begins with the development of reality. Without accumulating information, it is impossible to overcome the problematic situation, which is the beginning of any creative act: there is a creative need, there is an indicative task, but there is no solution to it. It will come only when the “saturation” comes with information and the concrete idea is seen.

But in different types of creativity this moment turns out to be fundamentally different. One thing, say, poetry, where the accumulation of information goes almost unconsciously, representing the direct experience of the creator of his relationship with reality. Another thing is science, which for years can “bind” the researcher to mastering the “intractable” subject, making getting the necessary information almost the only meaning of life.

In journalism, the initial stage of the creative process is also a specific phenomenon. It represents a conscious, purposeful cognitive activity, which has all the signs of a special status, namely: a special subject of knowledge, a special purpose, from which specific tasks, special conditions flow. We will try to understand what it means.

A journalistic work is created to report specific changes in reality — obvious (on-going events) or non-obvious (on-going problems). Accordingly, the subject of knowledge for a journalist is the concrete situations of life in which its new moments are revealed - positive or negative, but necessarily significant for many. In terms of time, this is predominantly a situation of current reality, that is, today's, “fresh”. We emphasize the meaning of the word "mainly." The fact is that there are cases when there is a need to address the facts of yesterday, and sometimes - especially if there are “white spots” in history - and to stories from the distant past. But these are the very exceptions that confirm the rule.

The scale of situations can vary in a wide range: from local (from the life of one person) to global (say, the environmental crisis threatening the planet). According to the stage of development of the contradictions manifested in them, they are divided into positive, problem and conflict. But the most important thing is that any of these situations is mastered by a journalist not simply by itself, but due to the wider situation of a problematic nature, in which she enters into the power of the systemic organization of the world (the situation at the plant is part of the state of affairs in the city, the situation in the city - part of the circumstances in the region, etc.). In this broader situation, a journalist is interested in one of its aspects - an urgent or imminent problem experienced by many people. It is in the context of a broader, larger-scale problem that a journalist studies his subject, establishing the nature of the relationship between them. And the character may be different:

Ø a specific situation can carry a problem, be its manifestation - and then it can act as a source of new information about the problem, about the causes of it, about the dangers that are associated with it;

Ø a concrete situation can carry in itself the experience of solving a large-scale problem - and then it is able to give knowledge about the ways out of the contradiction, about the means that it is advisable to use for this;

Ø in a particular situation, conflict consequences may appear in a timely manner of an unresolved problem — and then it becomes a source of knowledge about the losses that such collisions lead to.

It is this connection of specific real situations with large-scale problems that determines the relevance and general significance of the operational knowledge that the journalist informs the audience in his work.

But not only the subject of the cognitive activity of a journalist is specific. Specific and information about the subject, acting as the goal of journalistic search. Their range is wide: we need information that characterizes both the characteristics of the situation being studied and the features that unite it with a large-scale problem situation, both its retrospective and perspective, as the essence of what is happening (that is, the side that is not accessible to observation, comprehended only by thought) and the phenomenon is the side visible, audible, observable, amenable to reproduction in detail. It can be said that the goal of the cognitive activity of a journalist in the process of creativity is to obtain not only the necessary operational knowledge of reality, but also the means by which it can be adequately presented in the text. This is due to the peculiarities of the syntactic text that has developed in the process of the development of journalism as a special kind of creative activity. The main means for the expression of journalistic information are the facts - those “atoms” of reality that make up the situation and which, being marked in the text, are able to reproduce these situations with a greater or lesser degree of accuracy. If an artist, creating a picturesque canvas, looks at life, features of lines, volumes, light and shadow, in which the world is embodied, the journalist masters the details that make up the facts that allow to penetrate into their essence.

All this means that the cognitive tasks of a journalist are not only responsible and large in scope, but also very diverse. They have to be solved most often alone, in the shortest possible time, with an insufficient initial level of competence. In addition, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the cognitive process is inseparable from interpersonal communication and, consequently, from an active emotional experience of a situation, all the more so that the environment of communication does not always happen to be friendly to a correspondent. Hence the high intellectual and emotional stress, which increases the likelihood of miscalculations. There is one more feature of the conditions that significantly complicates the development of reality for a journalist: he almost always acts on a “foreign territory” - in an unfamiliar or little-known subject environment that requires some effort to adapt. Moreover, this objective environment can be located “on the ground, underground and in the sky”.

So, the conditions in which journalistic knowledge proceeds are as varied as the life to be depicted. It can be said that a stable sign of the conditions of a journalist’s cognitive activity is the lack of sustainability.

It should be borne in mind that the mental work, through which the correspondent from object-sensual contemplation of reality proceeds to comprehend non-obvious connections, the essence of the changes taking place in it, does not end at the moment of cessation of contacts with the object of knowledge. It lasts all the time, while there is work on the text. Strictly speaking, this is also only a conditional frontier of the cognitive process: the information obtained becomes the “ore” that a person, under certain circumstances, in one way or another will process throughout his life. But now it is important for us that when creating a work, complications of a cognitive nature may arise. Let's say, suddenly there is a so-called lack of material: an interesting conclusion seems to be suggesting, and the facts confirming it are lacking - at least go back to the object. It happens that you have to go ...

The combination of the circumstances considered has led to the fact that in the process of forming and developing journalism as a professional activity, certain forms of knowledge and its certain procedures have been established, helping to build work rationally and to obtain the most reliable result possible.