Chapter 1. An Important Profession
Perhaps I should first tell you how I, a journalist by profession, came to be in the education system.
When I finished high school on Sakhalin, I was sure that I wanted to connect my future career at least with a newspaper, that if I didn’t enroll, journalism would lose a lot in my face! After all, I was always in the whirlpool of school and extracurricular events, and it was important for me to tell the world about them! Therefore, there was no question about the choice: only the faculty of journalism!
My first step in my new profession began in the youth editorial office of the Sakhalin State TV and Radio Company. I was responsible for youth topics, for preparing news and reports for the youth audience. But I quickly realized that too much of this important work depends not on you, but on the team. And not always the members of this team are conscientious and honest. Even then, for me, journalism was first and foremost synonymous with the word “responsibility”. So I went to a youth publication. Here I wrote articles about various events taking place in the region, about brigade contracting, conducted investigations on behalf of “Komsomolskiy Projektor”, went on exciting business trips to all the islands, including the Kurils, in short — I breathed in the aroma of printing ink with a full chest and thought that there was no more interesting profession than journalist. It was an incredibly exciting time!
Then I was invited to a trade union publication to cover social problems, and I plunged headlong into a new topic. Soon I became the head of the newspaper’s department and started managing my own small team of journalists. We really helped people. We traveled on readers’ letters (feedback was strong then), investigated some shortcomings in housing and utilities, education system, social services, wrote articles about problems in the construction of youth housing complexes, about the life of people released from prison… Everything from politics to culture and sports was in the reporter’s field of vision. I gained a lot of skills, as we would say nowadays, competencies, in editing and designing newspaper layouts.
By the time I moved to St. Petersburg, I already had a huge professional experience, a portfolio of not just articles, but entire files of newspapers, well-established contacts and a clean reputation. It was difficult, but I found a job in a St. Petersburg newspaper with the symbolic name “CHANCE” and a new milestone in my history began.
I didn’t just learn to write according to the requirements of local journalism (I realized very quickly that it was different from our local journalism) — I had to dive headfirst into completely new niches. The topic “Real Estate Markets” alone was worth it! I was also given a whole tab called “Education” and I was just dizzy with the opportunities that St. Petersburg offered at that time. I wanted not only to write about it, I wanted to learn, learn and learn again.
At the same time I got a job in the magazine “Style”, where the charming Svetlana Volkova was in charge. Here I spent my soul on “women’s” topics: I wrote about fashion, culture, art. I made reviews of restaurants, cafes, clubs, beauty salons. During one of these “deep dives” the idea to write a book on self-care at home was born, which I did. (It was published under the pseudonym Inna Polyanskaya in the Nevsky Prospect publishing house — that was the publisher’s condition).
Then there were courses by the well-known Sergei Asimov, “Business without Startup Capital”, which taught me not to be afraid of creating my own projects. And I threw myself into a new abyss: my startup was an information and advertising guide called “The Woman’s Question” (thankfully, the subject was familiar), then “The Man’s Question”… The projects grew like mushrooms after rain. I found talented designers and advertisers who helped me a lot. I made contacts with printers who were able to reproduce the right format, gloss and produce the product exactly in the quality I wanted.
There came a period when I realized that my projects were too small for me, that I wanted to share my experience and knowledge with other people who also wanted to become journalists. And the first step in this direction was studying at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute. Herzen.
With a diploma as an additional education teacher I came to the Kolpinets Youth House to help children thinking about their future to realize their dreams. I am still convinced that journalism is a fascinating and important profession that can bring both benefit and pleasure at the same time.
