The article focuses on the topic of genre formation in Soviet journalism, and how genres have developed in the contemporary Russian mass media. The author is of the view that journalistic genres developed intuitively, rather than on the basis of a thorough investigation of the typology of mass media texts, and therefore bear all the hallmarks of a professional agreement. These practical, formally logical standards have no basis in scholarship, and as a result many publications dealing with questions of journalistic genres have no connection with the theory of journalism. They merely serve the «commonly accepted professional view» of the form that texts should take. This explains why there is continual discussion of the interaction, diffusion, mimicry and changes in the «identified genres» in a situation where there are no grounds for distinguishing between them, or fixed criteria for defining them. Introducing American forms of journalistic texts into the Russian genre system leads to an even greater entropy of established concepts. Concentrating on the study of the genre forms of journalistic texts in journalism education often hinders students in the acquisition of the habit of writing materials on specific thematic issues.
Genre Creation and Genre Formation
