Abstract:

The primary ambition of the presented study is to link previous scientific research on online media and the current practical dimension. It seeks to emphasize the important role of journalists in providing adequate and, in particular, truthful information on ongoing climate change. We see climate change as one of the biggest challenges today, not only for journalists, of course. But they are the ones who present selected topics, and therefore they should not only master them on a theoretical level but should be able to apply their knowledge in practice. Especially students of journalism should have a critical and disinterested view of the issue in order to be able to bring the most accurate, truthful, and objective information to percipients. The practical benefit of the offered text is the connection of research findings with their application to the teaching of environmental journalism. The importance and consistency of grasping the educational process in the study of environmental journalism are currently one of the priorities of the university education system. Online media offer unlimited space to deal with a variety of topics. They are not limited by time or space. The speed and availability of information force journalists to work with huge amounts of facts, for which their adequate selection is extremely important. Today's multiskilled journalists undoubtedly perceive these possibilities. In our study, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, we note the ways in which the topic of climate change is communicated in the Slovak online media. Journalists should not look for abbreviated, fast, convenient answers to the complex questions of our society. They should embark on all the complicated and complex work. They have to search for and awaken hidden links, threats, or connections. Our pre-research in the context of Slovak online media showed some differences in texts with environmental issues, especially in genres, in the length of individual texts or the diversity of their content. We perceive an important connection between the journalist's personality and the topic he is working on. Our concise research is based on the basic methods of online media research. The ambition of the above-mentioned research methods is to identify published journalistic texts in selected media on the basis of key features of online media, namely the usage of multimedia, hypertext, and interactivity. Finally, we additionally note the timeliness and variability of the expression in the journalistic texts (in the context of the use of graphs, statistical data, comparisons, infographics, etc.). Qualitative analysis will support our quantitative findings and allow us to find out in terms of content, which environmental problems and topics belonging to the portfolio of climate change are most often represented in the Slovak media. By the synthesis, we will point out which of the dominant specifics of the internet media are most used in journalistic articles dealing with the various issues of climate change.

Keywords:

Education, journalism, environment, climate change, online media.