Contemporary Problems of Social Work Современные проблемы социальной работы academic journal

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CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL WORK
has said. The event has already taken place, but journalists continue talking about it and trying 
to find out what made him/her say so. Or there is an emergency. It is impossible to plan one; 
therefore, it can only be reported as a past event in the Past Tense.
The main requirements to writing a television journalistic text are clarity, precision and 
brevity. The text of any journalist should be easily comprehensible to the average viewer, 
whether they have primary or higher education. “Use simple language, avoid participial” [19]. 
As regards news programs, the air time is limited. Within 2–3 minutes a journalist must be able 
to tell us about the issue and possibly suggest its solution. So talking about what color the flags 
were, what the official looked like, what color the snow is, and things like that, is absolutely 
senseless (unless it is an important part of the material). Moreover, in a televised material 
there is not only text, but also “lives”, “sync”, “stand-ups”. And all of them together with the 
text must not be longer than 2–3 minutes. No wonder journalists on TV speak so fast. Within a 
limited time they have to tell everything they know about the issue of their story.
Another essential thing on television is genres used by journalists, since “genre in 
journalism – a special form of organization of the material, which is a set of specific substantive 
and structural-composite sings” [14]. “Nowadays about 20 different genres are used in 
broadcasting” [1]. Depending on the purpose, these genres are combined into several groups. 
Modern theorists sometimes classify journalistic materials according to methods of collecting 
and processing information. So they divide journalism into commenting, reporting, etc.
L. E. Kroichik divided texts that appear in the press, into five groups:
1.  operational news – news note in all its varieties;
2.  operational research – interviews, reports, accounts;
3.  research-news – correspondence, comment, review;
4.  research – article, letter, review;
5.  research and figurative (artistic and journalistic) – essay, feuilleton, pamphlet [6].
Today in our national journalism we can see mixing genres. It means that in TV programs 
genre differences are becoming less noticeable when reporting information. They are hardly 
distinguished by the audience of the TV channel or even by professionals.
Many journalism researchers attribute this phenomenon to the decline of journalists’ 
professional expertise, others see it as a trend aimed at increasing the number of a TV channel 
viewers. Still others believe that the blurring of genre boundaries is a consequence of the impact 
made by postmodernism ideology and philosophy on modern journalism. The fourth “associate 
these features with the impact of new communication technologies and, in particular, with the 
emergence of hypertext as a new phenomenon of the information space” [9; 10].
Some journalism researchers wrote about genres boundaries blurring back in the 1970s. They 
believed that genres mixing contributed to their mutual enrichment. At the same time, genre 
values were reassessed, i.e. some genres were not used in the media any more, while others 
increased their presence. Many journalism theorists began to distinguish other genres, for 
example, journalistic investigation, confession, or conversation. The emergence of new genres 
and the death of old ones are inevitable.
Now the forms of the news presentation in electronic media have actually been turning 
into specific unique genres – a newsreader speaks incredibly fast and manages to tell us the 
news block for several minutes, inserting direct speech of participants of events and their own 
comments.
While preparing their materials, journalists hardly ever ask themselves: “which genre is this 
text?” The genre is usually identified intuitively. Exceptions might be when a journalist is 
working on an editorial assignment.
Television text depends on a video sequence. If an operator could not shoot how something 
was happening, it is not worth talking about. Therefore on television primar is a video. No 
visuals – no story. At the same time, duplicating video with the text is not recommended either. 

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Therefore, the text of a journalist on TV is squeezed into a very tight frame of a video sequence, 
timing, a program format, etc.
Having watched a number of television materials, we came to conclusion that the dynamics 
of stories is achieved through short off-screen texts. 3–4 sentences are good enough to lead to 
an interview or to tell you about the issue in question.
Many journalists who give master classes recommend that a report should start with the 
news, but not with a story about it. The word “news” itself implies something new, yet unknown. 
The news usually gets information occasion of journalistic material. You can talk about what 
happened a year or two ago, but it is better to do it in the midst of a story. “News information to 
a mass audience – is primarily a message about current events and issues in the country and on 
the international scene, that make history in the broadest interpretation of the term” [15; 20].
There is so-called “hard” news. When writing a text about it, a journalist has to answer the 
questions “What?”, “Where?” and “When?” it happened. The answers should be brief and clear.
Another important criterion that distinguishes texts of broadcast journalism from the print 
media is how figures are given in a text. Television journalists tend to approximate them. On 
television journalists try as rarely as possible to use numbers, and if they have to do it in their 
texts, they rounded data, try to compare them with something, using infographics for clarity. 
The newspaper can be re-read a few times, but numbers you have heard once are quite difficult 
to remember.
Characteristics of TV speech are based on general principles, which are caused by such factors 
as:
–  its oral nature;
–  peculiarities of its aural perception by the addressee;
–  specificity of its intended audience;
–  genre of TV work” [3].
The most frequent recommendation of many journalists is probably the following – “you 
should write so that your word would be heard, not read”. So, colloquial language is the most 
appropriate for television. “Swap the words, revere phrases, use intonation as possible, throw 
everything you can throw – ensure that, in order, to transmit the meaning of the minimum 
number of words” [5].
For this work, we have analyzed the text of the First Channel journalists (“Women who 
are ready to adopt a baby with terrible burns, was invited to the court for an interview” from 
12.22.2015) and MIA “Russia today” (“The Court of Tula, interviewed for а year-old Matwey 
adoption” from 12.22.2015) about the one same event. This event was interview about Matwey’s 
adoption, a boy who suffered because of the burn of a lamp during phototherapy sessions. The 
role of foster mother was claimed by two women.
These two materials were written about one event, but we see the differences in the ways this 
news was presented. On television, right in the introduction to the story, the presenter tells us 
about the boy, or rather his fate which “shocked a huge number of people”. The specialists of 
the news agency start their text with an upcoming event, that is, the hearings which “will take 
place on 14 January”. The text of television journalists appeals to the emotions of the audience. 
From the very beginning of the story, the TV correspondent says: “She is coming up to the 
courthouse with unconcealed excitement.” In the text we can find the following phrases and 
sentences: “to cover up a terrible story”, “Natalia believes”, “ It is already six months since…
has been fighting for the right to become mum”, “conversation with the judge who will decide 
the fate of the child”, “flatly refuses to communicate’, “she could not find the strength to stay 
with her son”, etc.
In the text of the news agency we can read: “The accident, which received great public 
response”. But even this example does not have such emotional connotation, compared to: 
“The story … has shocked a huge number of people.” and “to cover up a terrible story”. The TV 

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