Convergent Journalism: The Main Vectors of Development and Prospects

Today, convergence is called both the business strategy for the development of media holdings, and the tactics of convergence of dif-ferent media to promote services, and the merging of competencies in the training and professional activities of various media professionals, and the adaptation of public text to the realities of the latest technological revolution in the digital world, etc. The classical understanding of convergence as a mechanical merger is being revised. The generalized results of convergence in the media are new formats of information transmission and organizational and managerial structures optimized for this, hybrid content-genre forms, functional transformation of the media and much more. Convergence ap-pears to be an evolutionary process that unfolds at different speeds across a variety of vectors in the instrumental-technological, organizational -manage-rial and text-centric spheres. With a large assumption, it is possible to con-struct a universal periodization of media convergence with an indication of the time range for each stage, since different media follow their own trajec-tory in convergent evolution. The authors propose to count the start of evo-lutionary processes in each area and, according to the configuration of new features and specific results of evolution, predict a development model with promising tracks for a particular media. Using structural and comparative analysis, the authors study in detail the approaches to the interpretation of the concept of "convergence", comprehend its true nature, and also explore the instrumental-technological, organizational-managerial and text-centric spheres of media convergence. This makes it possible to predict promising directions of convergent evolution in each area. Special attention is paid to the analysis of new selective features of journalistic text in the digital envi-ronment, the vector of their development is determined. The authors deal with the problems of professional training of journalists, analyzes changes in the professional skills of specialists for convergent journalism.