Художній репортаж в українських друкованих та онлайн-ЗМІ (особливості розвитку жанру)

Abstract

The article examines the concept of literary reportage and the specificity of its functioning in Ukrainian printed and electronic media, with particular emphasis on the differences between traditional and literary reportage. The basis of literary reportage is informativeness (fact). As in the process of preparing traditional reportage, the journalist collects facts, interrogates witnesses, works with documents and archives, examines the situation and the characters of the future text. Analyticality manifests itself here in the understanding of the received information, methods of describing the problem and searching for its solutions, conducting observations both „from the inside” and „from the outside”. In order to be as faithful as possible on the one hand, and to introduce an emotional color – on the other, reporters use literary means; it is the lexical and stylistic features that give the reportage originality. The aforementioned elements appear both in literary and traditional reportage, but in the first case they are more emphasized, and in the second – they are kept within the limits appropriate for news journalism. Thus, literary reportage is the genre that exists on the border of journalism and literature, accumulating the features of both. At the same time, it remains necessary to separate the concept of belles-lettres from literary reportage. In the contemporary Ukrainian media, the genre of literary reportage is just beginning to develop; the Internet and the blogosphere play an important role in this process, where its model realizations can be observed most often. A lot of literary reportages can be found, among others, on the websites of Gazeta.ua, INSIDER and Reporters. In the printed media, literary reportage appears relatively rarely, exceptions include trip stories written in the form of reportage (magazines „MANDRY”, „Ukrainian Week”, „Kraina”) or literary reports found in „Gazeta po Ukraińsku”. The small share of this genre in the Ukrainian media space is related to several reasons. In the case of literary reportage, the length of the texts varies, but most of them are long, which means that they do not always fit in with the traditional formats of the mass media. In addition, the preparation and writing of this type of material requires more time and – when the message quickly becomes outdated – it often turns out that it is no longer worth publishing. The Internet has significantly accelerated the pace of journalistic work, at the same time moving it to a different level of quality. Literary reportage is not an ordinary mass medium, it is journalism with literary elements, and as such it forces a specific type of reading. It requires time that the average Internet user, exposed to distracting temptations (advertising, spam, social messaging), often does not have. All this causes an intense transfer of reportage from the media space to the book space, where the audience is more formed and better prepared to accept this kind of journalistic and literary experiments. And so in Ukraine, since 2017, there has been a publishing house of reportage and documentary literature „Czowen” (Lviv). So far, it has published over 10 books on literary reportage, both by Ukrainian and foreign authors. Particularly noteworthy are the books from the Tempora publishing house, which has been organizing a literary reportage competition since 2012 and presenting the best examples of this genre in anthologies and in the form of individual publications.