The 11th International Scientific Conference “Information Field in Modern Russia: Practice and Effects” opened yesterday at Kazan Federal University.

The event is organized by the KFU Institute of Mass Communications and Social Studies, Institute for Social Research and Civic Initiative and the Tatarstan’s Union of Journalists and is devoted to the 52nd anniversary of the journalism education in the Volga Region and the 210th anniversary of Kazan University.

The department of journalism was established at Kazan University in 1962 at the Faculty of History and Philology and was the only centre to train journalists to supply districts and Soviet autonomous republics of the Volga Region for a long time. In the early 1990s it became an independent faculty, since 2012 it was known as the Institute of Mass Communications and Social Studies until late August 2014 it became the Institute of Social Studies, Philosophy and Mass Communications.

The history of the conference “Information Field in Modern Russia: Practice and Effects” goes back to 2004 when it gathered very few guests from other Russian cities. The number of participants tends to rapidly grow, with 750 experts from 58 universities of Russia and abroad (Hungary, Finland, China, Canada, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan) to have participated in the event since its first edition.

The opening ceremony was kicked off by Mikhail Schelkunov, the Director of the Institute, who addressed to the participants with welcoming words and stressed the significance of the event for the journalistic community. “Journalism today is the 4th world power and a great instrument we should use with care”, he said, “A journalist does a complicated job, on the one hand, to provide the audience with information, and on the other hand, not to be led by the nose by this very audience and fairly and intelligibly present his materials without being manipulated by the authorities. There are no ready solutions how to do it. Nobody can deal with this challenge except the journalistic community. I believe the conference will go further ahead being the concussion of the air and necessary techniques and recommendations will be generated”.

Then Svetlana Shaikhitdinova, the head of the department of journalism, took the floor to award students certificates on their internship in the USA in April 2014.

A plenary session followed the official opening ceremony where keynote speakers spoke on the process of ethnic and cultural identification of the modern Tatars, methods of promoting scientific issues in present-day media, talk-show journalism and the opinions on the journalism education crisis in Russia.