The relevance of the study is determined by the fierce competition between traditional, especially print, media and new media, in connection with which it is necessary to determine the most popular format for presenting material to the audience. The purpose of the work is to analyze the lexical and stylistic features of the media in the Republic of Mordovia, to trace how this is related to the demand and popularity of publications among the audience. The goal determined the solution of the following interrelated tasks: (1) conduct an analysis of regional media, identify the most popular information resources; (2) analyze the lexical and stylistic features of the region's media texts; (3) determine how the richness or poverty of the lexical and stylistic palette affects the relevance of the media to the audience. The research methodology is based on the principles of systemic, structural and comparative analysis. The main method of analysis is content analysis. The analysis revealed the following: the lexical and stylistic diversity of regional media directly affects the relevance of the audience, increasing the indicators of engagement and citation. Regional media, focusing on informational genres and dry presentation of content, lose out to media using the full range of lexical and stylistic means, experimenting with genres, including journalistic, and multimedia formats. At the same time, it is necessary to maintain a balance between informing and lexical and stylistic "anarchy", which leads to the neglect of journalistic ethics. At the same time, the digital environment is not an obstacle to the use of more complex and larger media texts that have a high audience involvement.