Genre and functional peculiarities of photography on the websites of Chelyabinsk region broadcasters

This article deals with peculiarities of placing thematic pictures on the websites of regional broadcasters (the media holdings “OTV” (“the first regional”), STRC “Southern Urals - Chelyabinsk”, TV-company “31 Channel”) from the perspective of genre and functional analysis. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that modern mass media including websites of TV broadcasters use photography (along with video materials) as a primary means of representing reality. Besides, the role of pictures on the websites of broadcasters has been poorly understood so far; at the same time contemporary photography does not have only informative and illustrative functions, but also a special informative-complementary function that makes an online broadcaster visually richer. The authors single out principles of thematic categorization of photos that are identical with plots of video materials on the website, study specific features of freeze-frames derived from video materials, give reasons for the choice of genres - photo-information, photo-portrait and photo-report.