Journalism Genres as a Scientific and Practical Problem: to Professional Polemics Provocation of Media Theoreticians and Practitioners

The article is devoted to the topical problem of interpreting the role and place of genres in modern journalism. Eclecticism in defining the main groups of genres and their characteristic features comes from a misunderstanding by a number of the younger generation researchers of the genre theory features in different journalism schools. If in Western European journalism, the typical forms of material presentation for the media are traditionally genres, then on the American continent, such are literary or stylistic forms. Both in the first and second cases, it is important for professional journalism to have a thorough knowledge of the laws of these genres and understand their limits and the reasons for the interpenetration of forms elements. In different countries, there is a national classification of genres, where the number of groups and types of genres can be different. Based on this, it is not appropriate to impose a well-established classification on another national soil. Without destroying the tradition and creating artificially, for the sake of scholastic science, and new genres, it is important to know and creatively use the best that exists in each of those schools. In the practice of Ukrainian journalism, three genre groups have been established (informative, analytical, and artistic-journalistic) with a hierarchy of specific genres subordinate to each of them. It is absolutely important not to invent new genres but to substantiate their varieties within the existing ones. Journalistic investigation in Ukrainian journalism does not make sense to be classified as a separate genre. Already in the very name of this concept, a journalist's action is foreseen – a complex, often inaccessible, and even dangerous process of collecting, analyzing, and systematizing material. The result of such action can be either one or a series of analytical materials, a separate article. It is not about a genre but about a special type (method) of journalistic activity. The phenomenon of literary forms hybridization that arose in literary science and journalism is artificially imposed. The fashion for combining texts of different styles is not related to the requirements of the time but the professionalism level and the authors ambition. The tendency to add various links and images of other interactive forms to the texts on the Internet is evidence not of the hybridization of the genres themselves but the combined presentation of the topic and its complement