The article deals with writing and editing practices as key components of media environment that consolidate public intelligence and social activities. The authors analyze the results of a sociological study that involved a survey sampling 93 journalists from 27 Russian regional newspapers. The respondents were asked to give their opinion on mission and tasks of journalism, on types, stages and methods of writing and editing practices, on genre and topic-specific focus and other currently important issues. The study shows that regional journalists are largely focused on satisfying their audience’s needs and interests, and have a rather adequate and fully professional understanding of the essentials and features of writing and editing practices. The research also revealed that writing and editing practices are still dominant among other journalist activities, albeit they have survived significant transformations resulting from the most recent technological and socio-political processes. Meanwhile, the processes of writing and editing demonstrate increased operational efficiency and wider opportunities for communication and obtaining information. Emergence of new technological tools contribute to the development of media-publicity. Thus, journalists of regional newspapers are now working within the contemporary trend in conventive communication strategies and techniques, which generally conforms to the existing conditions characterized by a growing importance of discourse media landscapes as means of involving intelligence resources in programming, and in modelling and building up social practices. Besides describing and analyzing the criteria, conditions and factors of optimality of writing and editing, the authors note some negative current trends, particularly, multitasking of a journalist. This key trend requires a journalist not only to be a universal author, but also to act as a media-man that performs a large number of tasks, such as processing the content, its placement and promotion, etc. This leads to the necessity of acquiring new skills in preparing convergent content for various media-platforms and performing multiple functions under the pressure of staff redundancies. All this, together with other factors, has added to the increasing stressfulness of the profession, and caused a significant growth of the secondary, stereotypical, content. At the same time, veracity of the reported information and the share of high-quality and exclusive publications have decreased.

By informing mass audience about scientific, engineering, and technological achievements, modern media contribute to the growth of the prestige of scientific and innovative activities and increase society's susceptibility to scientific and technological progress and innovations. One of the priorities for scientific and technological development in the Russian Federation is the study and exploration of outer space. Mass media can be an effective tool for popularizing fundamental and applied space research and its impact on everyday life, thereby updating the image of space in mass consciousness and society's representations of the present and the future. The leading federal socio-political newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and Kommersant, as well as the online media Lenta.Ru and Gazeta.Ru, were selected as the object of this study. The research period covered January-December 2020. Publications related to space were selected and analyzed using Integrum, the information retrieval system for monitoring and analyzing the media, and the word2vec algorithm based on artificial neural networks. The original methodology made it possible to determine the ratio of publications about space in the total amount of mass media reports and to identify key topical areas of the space information agenda and features of its geography.

Использование средств массовой информации в России претерпевает трансформацию в связи с технологическими изменениями в коммуникационной среде. Привычные каналы создания и распространения информации вытесняет Интернет. Традиционные СМИ пытаются компенсировать отток аудитории, развивая цифровые форматы, причем не только сайтов, но и страниц в социальных сетях. Закрепление их позиций на медиарынке поддерживают различные инструменты продвижения как медиаконтента, так и собственного медиабренда. Один из таких инструментов - маркетинг в социальных сетях (Social Media Marketing, SMM).