GENRE AND THEMATIC FEATURES OF RUSSIAN SPORTS BLOGS
The article examines the most popular sports blogs on the social networks such as Instagram, VKontakte and YouTube. The author studied genre, format, thematic and visual features of the publications, revealed general and particular patterns of their development and presented the results of content analysis of 7374 publications from sixty blogs. The paper showed that a large number of sports blogs are specialized: mixed martial arts (MMA) are the most popular on Instagram, football is the favorite subject on VKontakte, and YouTube is keen on fitness. Thematic features of sports blogs are similar to those of specialized sports magazines while the genres that are found on sports blogs are different from the usual media genres. A specific genre adapted to the tasks of sports blogs prevails on each social network. This is the "clarification" genre on Instagram and VKontakte and the "challenge" genre on YouTube.