Journalism Development Tendencies at the Present Stage

For the first time, the article attempts to comprehensively study the current trends in Ukrainian journalism development in the global context. The author focuses on the essential trends within the media system: changes in the technology of creating journalistic products, the evolution of journalism functions and structural reformatting of the two main components of this system – online and print. Changes in the technology of journalism production are studied not only in the context of a set of positive qualities of digital technologies, but also several serious challenges that this phenomenon has generated, for which modern journalism has not been ready. This includes the difficulty of identifying fake news, detecting a plagiarist or a lying author, faking and cloning websites, and making changes to content that the author or editorial staff were not involved in. Also, about the development of legal mechanisms regarding the responsibility of journalism standards violators. New information about journalism’s functions evolution: the watchdog function, which is now popular in world journalism, was first substantiated by Ivan Franko in 1897, not after the Second World War by German and Swiss researchers. The modern Ukrainian media no longer form public opinion, but express it. The nature and scale of the changes taking place in the media industry are being explored. These changes are caused by the implementation of real steps of the state on the way to becoming a member of the European Union and NATO. The structural and ideological reformatting of the post-Soviet media in Ukraine was facilitated by the adoption of three important laws by the parliament: on public broadcasting, denationalisation of the press, and the media. One of the defining trends in newspaper and magazine journalism is the destruction of the Communist-Bolshevik press structure model based on the territorial and administrative vertical: republican – regional – district – multi-circulation – wall pre