Juvenile journalism in Russian historiography

The essay presents historiographical review of juvenile journalism in which children and adolescents are the communicators. The paper is relevant for researchers involved in the study of childhood of the XIX, XX and early XXI centuries because of the specific subject. The works related to the matter of juvenile journalism can be divided into two groups. The first group includes monographs, articles, text-books and manuals, in which juvenile journalism is regarded as an independent phenomenon. The second group includes works in which juvenile journalism is seen as a part of larger groups of media or other social phenomena. The pedagogical aspect of juvenile journalism is the most studied one and there is a lot of ideas of using the juvenile media for successful social adaptation, creative development, civic education of children and adolescents. However, despite the enormous experience and significant instructional framework, the theoretical foundations of juvenile journalism have been poorly understood. Only two large studies of the phenomenon have been published on Russian material (in 1901 and 1997), which do not allow to say that all aspects of juvenile journalism are well understood. Meanwhile the study of this particular segment of mass communication becomes even more important both in terms of allocation of its typological characteristics and in the context of historical development due to the transformation of the system of mass communications during last decades.