Everyone thinks he’s a traveller: a master class by Anastasia Melnikova

On February 28, Anastasia Melnikova, heads of the departments "Culture" and "Tourism" of RIA Novosti News Agency, held a master class at the media centre of the Institute of Media. The journalist talked about development trends in these spheres, how to write about tourism in modern realities, and answered questions from the audience.

© Photo: Vladimir Volkov

At the beginning of the master class, the creative director of the program "Journalism" Ivan Knyazev presented the speaker. Anastasia Melnikova began her speech with a story about the history of the sections "Culture" and "Tourism" on the platform of news agencies, demonstrated the updated RIA Novosti website and shared the difficulties occurring in the struggle for attention.

The speaker paid special attention to tourism and culture among all other news sections. She emphasised that the mission of such departments as "Culture" and "Tourism" is to inform without aggression, present new information about the world, get acquainted with interesting people, events, phenomena.

Anastasia Melnikova
Head of departments "Culture" and "Tourism" RIA Novosti

Everyone thinks he’s a traveller. In recent years, tourism within the country has developed very actively, more and more people began to travel to small towns. Our goal is to show the beauty of our native country and outline how it is better and cheaper to get there, fly, run, crawl. We are popularizers, and I see our common mission.

The listeners were interested in what the audience is reading now, how to write about culture and tourism, how to reorganise the work of departments so that these topics become interesting again. Anastasia Melnikova answered these and other questions, and also revealed her formula for a successful headline that will definitely attract attention: “We empirically found out that the words “museum” or “exhibition” do not work in “Culture”. If you write "Serov's exhibition" - people don't read. You write “queue for Serov” - views immediately grow. The words “inexpensive”, “economically” and the like also work well. Even in the classic “What? Where? When?" try to avoid formalism and clericalism.

Another important issue concerned the selection of topics. How to look for them, if "everything has already been written about"? “There are always topics in journalism that are relevant from year to year and tied to some events. People actively read materials like "Where are we going in the New Year?" or “Where are the cheapest tours now?”. It works great to attract travel bloggers who share unique stories with us. Tour operators, guides send us a lot of good topics,” says Anastasia Melnikova.

At the end of the master class, we asked the participants to share their impressions.

Anastasia
Student of the 11th grade, entrant of the Institute of Media

«Since I am far from this area it was interesting to learn about the specifics of the work of "Culture " and "Tourism " in RIA. I also didn’t know about the life hacks for writing headlines that Anastasia talked about, and the ability of cultural journalism to survive in such a critical situation, when most people care only about politics and economics».

Anna
Student of the 11th grade, entrant of the Institute of Media

«I am in the 11th grade, and the guys and I often ask ourselves how to write certain materials. Personally, I am more interested in business journalism, but tourism is also close to me. It was useful to learn firsthand how to write about it professionally in the format of RIA Novost»i.

We also asked a couple of questions to the expert.

— Are there any ethical difficulties in the struggle for the attention of the reader?

— Competing for the attention of the reader has really become more difficult over the past year. But it is important to continue to write about culture and tourism opportunities - even those who have left continue to be interested in this. There are controversial ethical issues in show business, but cultural portals have their own audience, which has not gone away: people who write about a new exhibition or about their emotions from a new film work specifically for it.

— Do you take students on internships? How do they go?

— We used to recruit in our departments, but now we need to keep an eye on open vacancies. More often than not, we take graduates. Interns pass an interview, write a test in Russian, and then we definitely arrange a trial day in the editorial office for them with real tasks that we solve during work, and this is a very useful practice.

Author: Ekaterina Novgorodova, 3rd year student of the educational program "Journalism" of the Institute of Media

Translation: Yanina Drankeevich, a first-year student of Master's programme "Contemporary Journalism"