TRAVEL JOURNALISM: FEATURES OF THE FIELD AND ITS PROBLEMS

Abstract

This article discusses various aspects of a little-studied field of journalism - travel and tourism journalism. The research methodology is based on understanding the mission of the mass media as an important means of popularising knowledge about other countries and peoples and about their role in intercultural communication. Raising questions about determining the place of this field within the media system and about tracing its history, the article focuses on the present-day problems of travel journalism in the context of the current issues of globalisation. The incorrectness of treating travel journalism as a "frivolous" field is demonstrated. At the same time, despite the growing importance of the integrative and communicative function of travel journalism in the modern world, it is simultaneously turning into a market-oriented field as well. This is mainly due to objective reasons, including economic ones, and also to the tendency of the mass media to move into the infotainment sphere. Qualitative changes have also occurred under the influence of the spread of the Internet and Internet journalism. As a result, this leads to a decline in analytical quality and depth in covering the "travel" theme. Therefore, the questions of the special and high-quality training of travel journalists and of studying the theory and practice of travel journalism are considered topical. Special training for future travel journalists is currently offered mainly in the form of online lessons, which does not ensure a serious level of preparation. Drawing on the experience of running a travel journalism course at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, the article attempts to formulate what the tasks and qualifications of a journalist writing about travel and tourism should be; an analysis of the existing specialised literature on the theory and practice of travel journalism is given.