Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

Dear colleagues, our authors and readers!

The topic of this issue of the journal is media language. It turned out to be a youth and, with the exception of one author (also very young), a postgraduate-student issue. Perhaps due to this, the approaches of the authors and the material they worked on, combine the traditional and the new.

The issue opens with the paper by a Novgorod State University postgraduate student, a practicing journalist working in regional media and, by the way, planning to study them in academia, Daniil D. Aleksandrov. He continues the topic of the previous issue and analyzes news texts generated using artificial intelligence, paying attention to two points – from which texts neural networks can form news and what failures appear in them. Although the author has read a lot of scientific works on the problem of using neural networks in the media, the paper is valuable primarily for the material that he analyzes – not fictitious, but real-life and, judging by the publication dates, recent.

Regional material is also analyzed in the paper by Kaliningrad author Tatyana V. Polyak, but in a completely different way. Having introduced the concept of the city's cultural media landscape, she collects and systematizes proper names found in this space. This allowed us to classify her work as related to regional media onomastics, although no one writes on such a discipline within media linguistics, as a search in the Russian Science Citation Index shows. The focus of this discipline may be primarily on the names of media institutions, but the names that the author analyzes also speak very eloquently about the region and its cultural traditions and aspirations.

In contrast, the material in the paper by Novgorod State University Associate Professor Elena A. Lebedeva refers to completely different realities – American cinema and texts about it. Without a second thought, we place her paper in the Media Stylistics section in the classical interpretation of stylistics as a science of stylistic devices or expressive means.

Elena Lebedeva's observations need to be included in a comparative study, this is possible in the future, and in this issue comparative media linguistics is presented by the papers of Natalia A. Klimkova from Petrozavodsk and Angelina A. Barysheva, who has completed her postgraduate program at Novgorod State University and is about to defend her dissertation. The authors of these papers teach German at their universities and study two media discourses — Russian and German. While Angelina A. Barysheva presents in her paper the result of studying the keywords of her research – culture and entertainment, Natalia A. Klimkova is interested in user comments. That is why the issue includes not only her research writing, but also her review of a monograph on this online communication genre.

If we take the genre aspect, which is most important for media linguistics, we find that the genre repertoire of the media texts studied in this issue consists of news, film reviews and commentary, as well as texts in which one can observe various urban onyms, for example, announcements, posters, etc. In other words, in this youth issue, the media sphere appears in a number of media genres and their interesting aspects – from defects caused by artificial intelligence to visual components, which speaks of the expansion of phenomena that media linguistics deals with. Especially by the young.

The geography of this issue is northwestern: along with linguists from Veliky Novgorod and Petrozavodsk, a linguist from Kaliningrad appears in the current journal, and the author of the paper on artificial intelligence represents St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, as well as Pskov.

I sincerely thank the authors of the issue and reviewers – Doctors of Philological Sciences Vladimir I. Zaika from Veliky Novgorod, Vadim A. Belov from St. Petersburg and Tatiana I. Steksova from Novosibirsk.

Until next time on the electronic pages of our journal!

T. V. Shmeleva