The chronotope of events in online news stories (coverage of the Syrian crisis in the Russian media)

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of formation of space-time coordinates of the media image of the event presented in the news reports on the online feeds of online media. The authors rely on the research of scientists from around the world devoted to the problem of changing and identifying such a thing as a chronotope in a literary text. Considering the theory of the chronotope, put forward by M.M.Bakhtin through the prism of journalistic activity, the authors reveal significant correspondences and the possibility to apply the main provisions of this theory to the study of the features of the event coverage in journalistic texts. Thus, in their opinion, the chronotope of the crisis event at its initial presentation in the online media space at the information and news alert level has specific characteristics, to which the author refers multi-fragmentary media reflection, representativeness, narrative and semantics. As a result, the authors come to the conclusion that the time component of the chronotope of the media image of this event is stable, but the intensity of its development is confirmed by the number of publications per unit time. The spatial component of the chronotope of this event is formed through the information resources that report the event. The maximum expansion of the space (25 sources) was on the 2nd and 8th hours, and the most stable wide boundaries of the space had from the 8th to the 12th hours (18-20 sources). According to the Bakhtin's theory, the supertext essence of the chronotope, namely, “the impression that is fixed in the reader's consciousness in the process of perceiving the author's narrative strategies”, is essentially nothing more than an image of the event formed by a journalist or journalists in the process of covering the event in the media.