The paper considers the speech genre “Journalist’s Notebook” on the material of Ilya Ilf’s “Notebooks”. The basic intensional feature of this genre is the fixation of observations and reflections expressed in words and statements noticed by the attentive and ironic writer. The journalistic notebook is a set of vivid speech examples recorded as material for further use in journalistic articles and fiction texts. This genre includes the following units: 1) contradictory denotations, which contain a certain internal contradiction and are represented by a multitude of one-word and non-word nominative constructions, strange funny names, funny occasionalisms, 2) expressive descriptions, which accurately characterize the depicted reality and include parodied speech samples and various types of stylization, 3) condensed narratives, which concisely show various plots in which certain types of people appear, 4) implicative reasoning, the interpretation of which requires an explanation of the context of the epoch, such implicatures create a feeling of inclusion in the reality of the twenties and thirties of the last century, 5) existential statements containing a value picture of the world. The journalistic notebook as a complex speech genre comes closer to the diary and commentary, expresses the author’s accentuated personal attitude to what is happening and fixes the most important signs of the epoch. For a writer, the journalist’s notebook acts as a pre-text for the creation of a work of fiction. Many notes from I. Ilf’s journalistic notebook were late r included in the novels “The Twelve Chairs” and “The Golden Calf”, written in co-authorship with E. Petrov.