“SUSU Faculty of Journalism is Ahead of Its Time” – Interview with Editor of L!FE Online Publication, SUSU Alumus Dmitriy Sadylko

The Faculty of Journalism is a structural division of the SUSU Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities. Today it forms the university’s communications and informational space during the multimedia integration of university news. Within its partnership with the European Journalism Training Association, the faculty carries out project work and trains multi-skilled media specialists who are in-demand in the modern media society. In the new academic year, the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications is opening new master’s programs: Transmedia Journalism and Media Communications (in English). We spoke with the editor of the sport’s section of L!FE publication (Moscow) Dmitriy Sadylko, who graduated from the SUSU Faculty of Journalism in 2015 with honours.

– Dmitriy, you’re now an experienced journalist – please tell us, how much, in your opinion, do the professionals and academics in the SUSU Faculty of Journalism meet today’s demands?

– The education in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications, jokes aside, is ahead of its time. When we were students, we were just getting used to the still somewhat unknown word “newsroom”, and now we come across it in every self-respecting editorial office in our country. Innovations are always difficult for society, especially at the academic level. However, in our Department in particular, and in the SUSU Faculty of Journalism, they began training multi-skilled journalists nearly 10 years ago.

– By the way, at that time, not everyone understood the need for multi-skilled media specialists, and there were many discussions on this topic.

– Of course, those who were used to the clear division between print, television, and radio journalism were surprised at first: who needs people who know everything, and how do you even train them. Today, it’s already difficult to imagine such a question. All journalists have to learn things, one way or another, this is an unavoidable part of developing within your profession. But graduates of our Department have always found things just a bit easier, because we studied in the most advanced faculty of journalism and we learned a lot about the modern content and technological details of the journalism profession while we were studying.

– What was especially helpful to you in your work as a media professional?

– I work in online journalism, and the majority of the skills I learned during my education, if not all of them, help me. New media is not just “about letters and words”: the created content also needs to be packaged. Here you also need to know about video editing, infographic creation, and even html layout – you literally everything. At the same time, in my current job, I combine work “in the field” and in the office, so the classic skills like how to hold an interview on the scene of an event, record a video, or write a good text are still necessary, of course, but you have to be able to technologically process information professionally.

– As far as I understand, today professional journalists on the Internet also need to be able to work quickly?

– The clips about superheroes with backpacks who are running in the field and “doing real journalism” from the textbooks have turned into reality, with each one of us in the main role. With the only caveat, that information is needed quicker and quicker. So no one will be waiting for you to send a video to an editor or an interview to a transcriber. Now, not just every journalist knows how to do this, but every social media user as well. So journalists have to do this two times faster and with twice the quality, before they’re replaced by robots.

– You’re right, robots that can put together information have already appeared… but do you really believe that they are able to totally replace journalists… people… professionals?

– Until this happens, you have to be able to work in transmedia. That is, you have to be able to do everything: find information, process it, package it, and release it. Thankfully, the SUSU Faculty of Journalism’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications taught us all of this, and regardless of what form this information may take: text, sound, video, official notice or a stories on Instagram, a post on Telegram, an inside, or a qr-code. If something comes to us, in a few minutes it will become a proper media text, created according to all the rules of multimedia storytelling. Everyone has the physical instruments for this, but only the graduates of our Department have the mental ones.

Olga Vazhenina; photo from the Department’s archives
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