«Our Goal is to Create the Nation’s Top Journalism Faculty»: Ivan Knyazev on the Past, Present, and Future of the Program
Three Steps to Build an Effective Program
When I became the Academic Supervisor in 2023, I had a simple yet ambitious goal: to build the best journalism faculty in the country. This objective was set with the full support of the Institute of Media’s leadership, particularly our Director, Ernest Matskyavichyus. I must also extend my gratitude to my predecessor, Tatyana Borisovna Tikhomirova, for her invaluable guidance during my transition.
At the time, the Journalism program had significant shortcomings. As professionals, we recognized a growing disconnect between the knowledge and competencies students acquired at the university and the actual demands of the job market. Newcomers our newsrooms — as anchors, correspondents, and editors — often required extensive retraining.
First, we needed to significantly improve the practice-oriented component of the program by bringing in professionals who are active, working journalists. We invited the best of our colleagues to join our faculty. The HSE brand is quite powerful, and many top professionals were eager to collaborate. This, however, presented a new challenge: transforming professionals into effective educators. So a new monumental task became my responsibility. My personal pride, and our collective achievement, is that we successfully turned many of these practitioners into excellent teachers. The results of the Student Course Evaluations confirm that fact.
Second, we were surprised to discover that the Institute of Media lacked its own dedicated media outlet, despite having a Media Center brimming with technical capabilities and resources. So, we created the «Higher School of News». Our first and second-year students now live and breathe it: they are constantly on shooting assignments, recording news broadcasts and podcasts, and conducting interviews — I can hardly keep up with all their activity. The HSN online editorial team even won a student TEFI award this year. It’s a National prize for excellence achievements in television arts. I’ve been in television for 22 years and don’t have a TEFI! Of course, we provided guidance and support, but they accomplished this largely on their own. This is a major victory for us, and for the students themselves.
These were other initiatives, but the core program itself also required a major overhaul. The selection of mandatory and elective courses lacked, in our view, a coherent system. We had to completely rebuild the logic behind how theoretical knowledge and professional competencies are acquired. Our first step was to return to a tried-and-true method: we introduced specializations, or tracks. This was driven by our practical industry experience: we saw young specialists joining our newsrooms who knew a little about everything but couldn't properly write a news report or an article. This had to be changed. Knowledge alone is not enough to create a qualified specialist; concrete practical skills are essential.
Another challenge was to preserve the ability for students to choose disciplines and shape their own educational path after introducing these specializations. This flexibility is a hallmark of HSE, and we were determined to keep it. We optimized courses with low enrollment and, over two years, added a host of new courses and electives. For a time, Journalism program students were effectively studying under two different curricula: some on the new plan, others finishing on the old one. This forced me to learn to think in multiple dimensions simultaneously, ensuring the knowledge and skills from workshops, specializations, electives, and core courses would integrate organically.
Studying Journalism? At the Institute of Media!
By the end of their first year, our students can already get a clear sense of what interests them professionally. We appointed highly experienced professionals to lead our tracks: Mikhail Zelentsov, a specialist in business journalism, heads the «Business Journalism» track; Vasily Maksimenko, one of the creators of the «Smotrim» platform, leads the «New Media Journalism» track. Foreign correspondent Alexander Khristenko heads the «International Journalism» track, where students additionally study a second foreign language — French, Spanish, Arabic, or Chinese. And, incidentally, the track is taught by current employees of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs! I myself took charge of the «TV and Radio Journalism» track, having worked in this field my entire career. Every instructor on my track is a practicing journalist.
We are particularly proud of our creative workshops led by media luminaries (Ivan Kudryavtsev’s Cinema and Journalism workshop, Sergei Malozemov’s Science Journalism workshop, Vadim Takmenev’s workshop, among others) and even by major media outlets themselves: Vedomosti, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, plus a workshop with VK. No other university in the country offers workshops like these. You won’t find Vadim Takmenev or actor Igor Petrenko teaching anywhere else.
However, we faced another serious challenge: avoiding becoming a mere trade school for journalists. It was crucial to maintain a balance between practice-oriented disciplines, the study of new trends like digitalization and AI, and preserving a strong humanities core. We tripled the number of hours dedicated to Russian language and literature. Why? Because a journalist must be able to write well and be erudite and well-read. Even as AI becomes a digital assistant for journalists, the audience will soon develop a keen appetite for authentic, authored content. A person cannot create quality authored text or perform analysis if they cannot write and possess a narrow worldview. Technically, you can teach someone to shoot a report in a week and to present the news in a couple of months, especially if they have a knack for it. But making a journalist highly educated, analytically minded, and media-literate is not so simple.
Ultimately, technology does not answer fundamental questions of meaning, and journalism is always a search for meaning. We offer a robust selection of humanities disciplines: philology, literature, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and more.
Of course, we haven’t forgotten key trends. AI disciplines are integrated into every year of study, including «Generative Algorithms in Video Production»,«Practical Use of Generative Models in Media Content Creation», «AI and Neural Network Technologies in Journalism», and «AI Applications in Production Technologies». We integrate digital competencies even into courses like «Practical Stylistics of the Russian Language». Student skill levels vary greatly. Last year's freshmen looked at us somewhat skeptically when we started talking about AI, as if to say, «We can tell you all about that». That’s encouraging, but we still have a thing or two to surprise them with.
New Disciplines: From PR and IT Journalism to Postmodernism
We have introduced around 40 new disciplines over the past two years.
New courses on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years are expanding students' professional knowledge and opportunities. Examples include «Technologies for Creating Historical Documentary Projects», a course by Ekaterina Burlakova on working with historical facts, and «Corporate PR», new for the coming year. Many of our graduates work in brand media, press services, or PR departments. Other interesting new courses include «Show Programs in Modern Media», «Modern Reality Shows», «New Sports Media», «Basics of Sports Commentary», «Podcasting as a Tool for Promotion and Content Monetization», «The Art of Public Speaking», «CultTech: Digital Transformation in Journalism and Cultural Industries», «Sound Design in the Modern Media Industry», «IT Journalism», «Basics of GR Communications in Journalism», «Political Geography for Journalists», «Modern Creative Industries of the Asia-Pacific Region», «Mass Media and Strategies for Managing the Past,» «Effective Communication in Negotiations», «Emotional Intelligence in Journalism», «Producing Projects in the Digital Sphere», and many more.
Last year we launched a new project seminar, «Design in Media». This year, a «Multimedia Special Projects» seminar led by journalists from TASS will be added. Their special projects department works with innovative multimedia formats, and students will learn to create their own projects by integrating various media elements.
Journalists shouldn’t confine themselves to the current news agenda; it’s important they understand other spheres, like art. How great is it when a journalist, while interviewing someone, can knowledgeably discuss art, history, modernism, or postmodernism? Therefore, our program offers a wide array of such disciplines in its online course block. Students can explore the history of design and advertising, contemporary art, and much more.
More Than Just Studies: Work, Research, and Creativity
As part of the «Production and Producing of Documentary Projects» course, our students have produced several professional documentary films.
Fourth-year Journalism students Arina Korosteleva and Maxim Selivanov created the documentary «Crocus: A Cut Flower», under the guidance of renowned documentary producer and new Institute of Media professor Alexander Dyukov. The film will be aired on federal channels OTР, Rossiya 24, and Spas. The same students, in their third year, produced the documentary «Beslan. Remembering What You Want to Forget», which has already been broadcast on a federal channel.
Currently, Alexander Dyukov’s students are filming a documentary about volunteers cleaning up an oil spill on the Black Sea coast.
In March, we hosted a powerful and likely unique national conference: the All-Russian Research and Practice Conference «Modern Media: Strategic Narratives and Personnel Training». Its level can be judged by the participants: Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov; Russian Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova; Director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova; heads of nearly all major Russian media holdings and companies; prominent journalists; and faculty from leading Russian universities.
This conference will become our flagship annual event, preceded by smaller-scale conferences discussing pressing topics in the media sphere.
We also have the «Young Media» research conference, where our students present their academic work. A collection of publications based on its results has recently been released.
What’s Next?
Another goal I’ve set for the coming year is to reformat and reorient the program’s disciplines towards a project-based learning model. We will draw on the experience of the HSE School of Design, adapting it to our specific needs. Many of our courses already culminate in excellent student projects. These can be packaged into a student portfolio on a dedicated webpage, a valuable asset for job seekers. Employers can search for projects by tag and see who created them, moving beyond abstract resume lines to a demonstration of tangible skills.
We will also continue to develop our research direction. Based on our courses in economics and media economics, we have created a «Laboratory for Business Journalism» to facilitate the writing of research articles and the organization of various studies. Our goal is to launch joint projects with state institutions and ministries like Rosstat, the Auditing Chamber, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and the Ministry of Economic Development.
Separately, we are establishing a «Bilingual Research Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence: Platforms and Algorithmic Cultures», headed by Institute of Media Associate Professor Irina Dushakova. Research will be conducted in both English and Russian, involving our bachelor and master programmes' students and faculty.
I also hope to see several research groups emerge next year to study the implementation of AI in journalistic practice. We have already successfully explored this theme in several term papers and conducted promising small-scale experiments. This is pure science on its own.
Students choosing an academic career path can use these laboratories to lay the groundwork for future research, with publishing opportunities available through our newly established relationship with Aspect Press publishing house.
We now have about 90 industry partners where our students intern and train, including Russia’s leading media companies.
A new partner, for example, is Kaspersky Lab. They approached us this spring with a proposal for collaboration, and we are now jointly launching a new course on digital journalism.
We have doubled the number of Doctors of Sciences on our faculty, strengthening our academic roster. It’s unlikely any other journalism program boasts such a concentration of both scholars and practitioners.
This goal once seemed overly ambitious to me — to create the country’s best journalism program — but I believe we are confidently moving towards it.
Building a truly high-quality educational program takes time, ideally about ten years. Yet, in the last two or three years, we have managed to accomplish a great deal, elevating HSE’s Journalism program to a new level. We will continue to improve. Our main guide remains our students — their needs, along with employer demands and current trends in education and the profession, will determine our program’s future direction.
Ksenia Zhakova, fourth-year student of the «Journalism»
Translated by Alexandra Volkova, second-year student of the «Interactive Media and Digital Industries»