Communicative Strategies of an Interviewer Yury Dud: A Linguist’s View of the Media Phenomenon in Mass Culture

Abstract

Purpose. The article examines the methods of building dialogue in interviews conducted by the popular video blogger and journalist Yury Dud, who is named the main hero of Russian cultural life in 2020 by Forbes Life. To determine his individual style, the author analyzes strategies of communicative behavior. The following parameters are the most significant for the description of interviewing strategies: thematic repertoire and thematic dominants of the conversation; methods of requesting/extracting information; methods of interpreting and evaluating what the interlocutor said; the choice of language code. The empirical basis of the study contains interviews by Yu. Dud with various interlocutors – journalists, TV presenters, cultural and show business figures, politicians, and other public figures, uploaded on the YouTube video hosting service in the period of 2017–2020. The analysis of more than 40 programs allows observing a wide range of techniques of a journalist, depending on the “addressee factor”.Results. The key topics that are regularly discussed in interviews are identified, including those that violate ethical taboos (about sex, bad behavior, and bad habits, judgments and hot takes on colleagues and senior officials, etc.). The thematic repertoire is considered as a deliberate communicative choice of a journalist, conditioned by the dramaturgy of public dialogue addressed to a mass audience and the tasks of portrayal.The author reveals the distinctive methods of requesting information and eliciting facts, which is inherent to the journalistic style of Yu. Dud: illocutionary forcing reasoning (“why-questions”), clarifying questions, reformulating, role modeling of relations with a guest, where the journalist often pretends being dilettante. Interpretation and evaluation of the interlocutor's statements are based on the clearest identification of their position for the mass addressee by an explication of ideas expressed by the guest implicitly, “delegation of opinion”, and the effects of “insight”.The choice of the language code indicates the “discursive adaptation” of the journalist to his interlocutor and allows the journalist to reveal to the mass audience their personality, including their speech characteristics. The dynamism of the dialogue is due to the setting to dramatize the conversation scenario: this is manifested not only in the choice of somewhat unexpected topics of conversation, but also in the expression of one's attitude to the statements of the interlocutor, explicit/implicit assessments, and the choice of the speech code.Conclusion. It is concluded that Dud’s interviews are a vivid example of the trends of modern Internet journalism, and the communicative strategies he implements allow us to see the prospects for the development of the genre. Given the popularity of the genre in traditional and new media, the author notices that the interview not only reflects the features of social communications of the 21st century but is also a powerful factor of shaping modern mass culture.