Printed media of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus in digitalization conditions: transformation of content delivery methods and search for a new audience

Abstract

The paper identifies and explores methods for transforming content delivery and ways to search for a new audience by the editorial offices of newspapers in two countries representing the Union State: the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. We show the transformations of the media environment that occurred under the influence of digitalization and the transition of a significant part of the audience to the Internet, taking into account both global factors and national specifics. The authors pay special attention to the growing tendency to view news on mobile devices, to increase the share of visual content in online media, the use of multimedia elements in the practice of creative activity. Using the methods of content and structural analysis for the six media under study, the authors found that the editorial offices respond to the new challenges of accelerating digital transformation, representing the journalistic content in today's mobile and visual formats. The challenges facing the system of modern Internet media of the two countries in connection with the increasing role of technology in the production of journalistic texts were also identified. Changes in the journalistic profession in the online media sector associated with the growth of convergent processes have been demonstrated. The main conclusion is the following: in the conditions of digitalisation and mediatisation of society, periodicals in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus are subject to significant transformations. In modern conditions, the media of the two countries are changing, offering to the audience the content which is relevant to its requests in the latest high-tech formats.