Social Media as a Tool for the Development of Future Journalists’ Communicative Competence

Abstract

The aim of the work was to test the opportunities that social media offers on the Internet as a tool to improve the future journalists’ communicative competence. Sociological methods were involved in the research in order to achieve its aim: a method of testing respondents to identify their initial level of communicativeness on the Communicative Competence Test and the Questionnaire Survey Method to obtain feedback from participants in the experiment. Working on media content on the Internet proved to improve communication skills of future journalists with the help of popular YouTube media and blogs with bright visual content. It was found that media resources can be used during lectures to stimulate interest and to engage students in active learning that promote deeper knowledge. The possibility of involving online mass media in joint learning, problem solving, interactive lecture demonstrations, as well as discussions was noted. A number of difficulties that the course participants encountered were found: a thorough understanding of copyright law, increased workload, lack of skills in working with electronic text, video and audio content, increased visual load. However, these difficulties did not affect the quality of training and allowed the participants to improve not only communication skills but also digital information skills and online media literacy. It was proved that social media is a powerful additional tool that encourages students to actively study, get high results and sustainable professional skills that are in demand in the future workplace. The media cannot, however, replace traditional teaching methods which are based on personal communication. Further research is required on complex long-term courses that use a wider range of media, including Tik-Tok, Facebook, Instagram, extended blogs in the form of a multipage website, a funnel for gathering the target audience and subscribing.