As part of last Thursday’s scholarly conference, Globalization and Problems of Domestic Media Space, hosted by the National University of Zaporizhia, the university’s students attended three events with the participation of The Day’s Chief Editor Larysa Ivshyna: a master class for journalism students, a presentation of the books from The Day’s Library Series, and a roundtable discussion entitled “Moral Choices Faced by Ukrainian Journalists in the Current Political Environment.”
As Journalism Department deputy dean Viktor Kostiuk said before the master class, the Zaporizhia University had long looked forward to the meeting with The Day’s chief editor because, among other things, the department uses the Ukrainian and Russian language issues of The Day as a teaching aid on contemporary journalism.
The Day’s chief editor showed as much interest in the Zaporizhia students as they did in her. According to Larysa Ivshyna, Zaporizhia is not only and not so much a major industrial region whose mental climate is in many ways determined by a “Soviet veneer.” “It is primarily a region of the Ukrainian nation’s deep-rooted freedom and glory.” It is difficult to overemphasize its historical significance, since it was in the Cossack republic known as Zaporizhia Sich that many features of Ukrainian national character had been engendered. According to Ms. Ivshyna, “The many gargantuan concrete constructions are the revenge unleashed by the Stalinist system against the bastion of freedom on the Dnipro.” Therefore, it was an appropriate venue for this attempt to jointly comprehend the Ukrainians’ contemporary problems from the historical perspective (Larysa Ivshyna described her impressions of what she saw on the Khortytsia Island as “grandeur and catastrophe”).
Has Ukrainian journalism become Ukrainian in essence and not in name only? Europe as a system of values and not merely a geographical location. Quality roads as a necessary precondition for the building of Ukraine’s image in a natural way. Read the Zaporizhia students’ views of these and many other issues in the upcoming issues of The Day.
