The Audience of the Legal Press for Non-Lawyers

Legal awareness, which is a set of reliable knowledge about the current law and the ways of its implementation in specific relations, is intended to form and enhance the competence of specialists who, by virtue of their professional duties, are constantly guided by it. The purpose of the study is to highlight the audience features of legal press publications in Ukraine which contribute to the development of legal literacy of specialists of non-legal professions. In order to solve the research tasks and achieve the goal, the author used general scientific and special methods, in particular: comparative - to identify, on the basis of the collected data, trends in the formation of the audience of legal publications for non-lawyers; inductive - to summarise the identified trends and formulate conclusions; typological - to differentiate information in accordance with the division of publications according to the established criteria and to identify the portrait of the reader of the publication. Empirical and theoretical methods were used at different stages of the study to solve certain research tasks: observation, description, classification and systematisation, etc. The legal press for non-lawyers was published for representatives of various specialities and positions (for example, newspapers: “Advokat Bukhhaltera”, “Pratsia i Zarplata”, “Kadry i Zarplata”, “Konsultant Kadrovyka”; magazines: “Kadrovyk UA”, “Kadrovyk Ukrainy”, “Pratsia i Zakon”, “Oplata Pratsi”, “Praktyka Upravlinnia Zakladom Osvity” and others), as well as for representatives of entire industries (for example, magazines: “Derzhsluzhbovets”, “Pravo Viyskovoii Sfery”, and the bulletin “Reduktsion”). In general, we tried to identify the portrait of the reader of the press publications issued for representatives of certain specialties/positions, and to find out, using regulatory documents, the current qualification requirements for their positions. Thus, it has been confirmed that the reader of the legal press for human resources professionals is mostly a person who has the appropriate educational level (for managerial positions - complete higher education (master’s or specialist’s degree) and work experience in the specialty, for non-managerial positions - basic or incomplete higher education (bachelor’s or junior specialist’s degree). As for the portrait of the reader of publications for representatives of various industries, it is not always possible to distinguish it, since each industry employs people in various positions, some of which require a high level of education and work experience in the relevant positions, others have established requirements for which an incomplete higher education or secondary specialized education is sufficient, and some do not require specialized knowledge confirmed by a diploma.