Newspaper and Magazine Production: Mass Media Аctivities and a Training Course

The article summarizes the experience of teaching of the course “Newspaper and Magazine Production” at the Institute of Journalism of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and gives an assessment of effectiveness of various educational tasks in order to acquire competencies by the students that are required for successful work in print media. The today’s higher education institutions around the world, and in Ukraine in particular, are shifting the emphasis from providing purely theoretical knowledge to practical competencies gained by the students for their successful practical implementation in various fields of activities. It entirely concerns to future journalists’ training.The practice of training of future journalists of newspapers and magazines at the Institute of Journalism convincingly shows that the most effective form of training of such media professionals is a long-term business game, when educational editorial offices are set up, the result of which is to produce the pilot issues of newspapers and magazines. In this case, the scope of theoretical education is minimized, and the students learn in practice to choose the segment of information market, to develop the concept of the edition, to establish an editorial office with all structural units necessary for its effective functioning, to write and to prepare for publication the journalistic materials and eventually to reach the final result – the pilot issues of newspapers and magazines.