Theme 3: Research and theory

The journal that I’ve read is called “Journalism and theory of journalism: Contradiction of interaction”. The journal is “focused on complex problems which characterise relationships between modern theory and practice of journalism. Special attention is paid to situation in the Russian media community. After the crash of the Soviet political system domestic press has lost former methodological base. It started to develop spontaneously by empirical ways. In these conditions the ideas of a denying any theory appeared, in different forms and variations.”
The journal can be found on page 123 on this link: http://www.scientific-publications.net/download/media-and-mass-communication-2012.pdf

1. Briefly explain to a first year student what theory is, and what theory is not.

To understand what theory is and what theory isn't, we need to look at the word theory. Theory comes from the greek word “theoria” meaning viewing or beholding something. Many would say that the opposite to theory is practice, meaning doing from the greek praxis. So, just by looking at the word definitions, theory means that you observe and “not theory” means doing.
One other way to look at theory and “not theory” is by looking at innovation in different areas. for instance Darwin went around the earth and found and named species. This work that he did was mostly based on practise, but then later in order to categorize the different species, theory could have been used.    
The ultimate way for best result is then to have skills in both areas of theory and “not theory”.

2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?

in the journal that I have chosen, he talks about the difference between “journalism and theory”. The major theory type that he uses in his paper is Analyse theory. Since they are doing the research on gathered data, most of the context in this journal is by analysing this data and trying to make conclusions.

3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?

The benefit of using theories is that you don't really lose any “thoughts” or information. This is similar as what we talked about during the seminar. We mentioned for instance that newspaper (we assumed) says the truth about fact (many political issues), but it doesn't necessarily need to be the entire truth. It could be the same with only selected theories. The selected theories that are mentioned could be true, but it doesn't says all of the theoretical knowledge. I don’t really have any example of that, but if anyone has, please share it with me on the comments.
The limitations of using all you will kind of be sucked into much reading and eventually start getting confused about what you really are reading. I have an example of that, and that is a common math course here at RIT. In the beginning, after some selected new theories, you are still able to keeping up with everything. But after a while, when all theories has been teached, you start having problem understanding.