PRINCIPLES OF TASS EDITORIAL POLICY IN DEALING WITH REGIONAL INFORMATION
This article comprehensively examines the concept of editorial policy and proposes a definition covering many aspects of the concept at the level of conception and its practical implementation. In a case study of the TASS news agency, the article investigates the editorial policy in dealing with news from the Russian Federation regions. By employing an approach based on semistructured interviews with the agency’s managers, the author of the article identifies the basic principles of the regional direction of editorial policy, as well as their impact on the organization 107of the production processes, and predicts the risks associated with their introduction. The study showed that at the national level TASS sees its mission in integrating regional news into the federal agenda and revealing the information potential of the regions, which may be treated as a sign of state information policy. The agency declares the priority of national interests among the basic principles of its editorial policy, understanding it primarily as information support for the socalled strategic topics, which creates the risk of content "bureaucratization". At the same time, in developing the concept of its editorial policy, the agency considers itself independent and has not experienced pressure from its owner - the government of the Russian Federation