20 Feb 2012 14:01

Interfax style guide officially included in libraries at Russia‘s ten leading universities

A news reporting manual titled, Interfax News Technology: A Style Guide, authored by senior news editors from the Interfax news agency has been officially included in libraries at ten leading Russian universities.
The book was recommended as a manual by the Training and Methodical Organization for Classical University Education and donated by Interfax to the libraries at the following universities: Lomonosov Moscow State University; Moscow State Institute of International Relations; Higher School of Economics; Kazan (Volga), Urals and Far Eastern Federal Universities; Griboyedov Institute of International Law and Economics (Moscow); and Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University.
Remarkably, the popularity of the Interfax book extended beyond Russia‘s borders, with the Yerevan State University (Armenia) becoming the eleventh higher-education institution to officially include the book in its library.
"A 2000 copy run of our manual was first published in early 2011 and sold out in less than half a year. Such a successful start enabled us to publish, as early as August 2011, an additional edition of the book sought after by the country‘s largest universities," said Yury Pogorely, one of the book‘s authors and Executive Director of the Financial and Economic Information Service at Interfax Group.
"Our book is actively entering the teaching process of journalism courses at the best Russian universities, where leading journalists and editors, including from Interfax, read lectures and hold master classes in news reporting," he said, stressing that "over a short period of time, Interfax News Technology: A Style Guide has gained broad popularity, becoming a bestseller not only among students but also professionals: news editors, journalism professors and PR experts".
Pogorely said the Interfax news agency‘s medium-term plans including publishing a second, amended edition of the book. "I believe we shall deal with it in about a year when some of our genres and approaches to event coverage will have passed the test of time," he said.
Today Interfax is the only Russian media outlet to have published a manual based on the in-house, actual standards of news writing and providing a detailed description of the process of creating, checking and pre-publication preparation of news stories, with examples from the agency‘s newswires.
The news reporting standards developed by Interfax in the late 1980s - early 1990s have now become generally accepted. However, for the first time the book Interfax News Technology: A Style Guide offers to a broad circle of specialists such a detailed description of the agency‘s unique technology of writing political and economic news stories.
The book was reviewed by Prof. Yelena Vartanova, Doctor of Philology, Dean of the Department of Journalism at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Andrei Korotkov, Doctor of Economics, Head of the Chair of Global Information Processes and Resources at the Russian Foreign Ministry‘s Moscow State Institute of International Relations.