The formation of aesthetic criteria in journalism is a logical continuation of its understanding in the context of the aesthetic space of modern culture. The information glut of the modern media determines the emotional, sensual, that is the aesthetic basis of the audience’s choice of published material and its impact. The article does not analyze individual aesthetic phenomena and practices, but focuses on the corresponding system of evaluating journalistic content based on the social aesthetic ideal and professional attitudes.
According to the author, identifying aesthetic criteria in journalism is faced with a number of contradictions associated with current trends in the media environment. The criteria are determined by objective conditions and processes in the media field and journalism functioning as a social institution. The combination of the initial factors and components of aesthetic evaluation of journalistic content, including temporal-stylistic, documentary, artistic, functional characteristics, as well as parameters of mass character
and individuality, standard and uniqueness, allows offering basic clusters of aesthetic criteria. They are clusters of integrity, expressiveness, production and impression. Clusters make it possible to delineate the area of aesthetic evaluation, and, possessing mobility, demonstrate the interconnectedness and mutual influence of the criteria that make the evaluation up, and provide for the criteria’s variability. Associated with the professional coordinates of relevance, reality, social functioning, targeting and replication, they can serve as a basis for developing specific parameters for assessing aesthetic activity in journalism.
In the process of understanding how an aesthetic impact occurs, aesthetic ideas, impressions and aesthetic ideals are broadcast or formed; the harmonizing potentials of journalism are identified in correlation with its nature and association with its social functioning. Professional coordinates help to realize aesthetics as an internal reality of journalism, introduce aesthetic ideas into the mainstream of everyday practice; they become the matrix that allows creating criteria for aesthetic evaluation of a wide range of journalistic works. The development and detailing of relevant criteria and parameters in their methodological perspective have undoubted prospects both in the analysis of journalistic content and in the applied field of professional training of journalists.