How is journalism defined in university handbooks? A conceptual analysis of students’ literature, ex...

<jats:p> New generations of journalists get involved in their professional activity after years of studies in journalism schools or universities. Handbooks supporting their studies are rarely in the focus of researchers. However, the definition of journalism presented in such books, are usually recognised as the basis of this profession’s identification. In this article, 501 Russian handbooks and 135 Belarusian student books published between 1991 and 2020 are analysed as a conceptual source of the definition of journalism. Concept-analysis (as a part of a cognitive linguistic approach) is applied to the data: each definition is interpreted as a set of ‘semantic quanta’ organised in the core-peripheric field (‘sphere’). This helps find an implicit ‘cognitive formula’ of journalism in post-Soviet countries journalism education and enables to identify its dynamics and stabilisation. In Russian handbooks, journalism is represented and defined as a regular system with institutional mechanisms (‘a news producing plant’), and in Belarusian student books, it is considered as individual art-literary writing (‘personal creativity’). </jats:p>