Regional investment forums in Russia: media rating and life cycle

The article considers the media representation of Russian investment forums as an indicator of external attention to the event and its recognition for comparative analysis. The purpose of the work is to develop methodological tools for studying the effectiveness of regional investment forums in terms of their media activity. The novelty of the research consists in the developed and tested tool for analyzing media activity around the regional investment forum based on the results of monitoring the internal information space of the Russian Federation. The authors propose the method of constructing the media rating of forums which is of tactical managerial importance for the organizers of the regional and federal levels. The rating methodology is based on the stages of the event (the announcement month - the event period - the month of summing up), the division of information sources into central and regional, as well as the geography of information messages about the forum. As a result of testing the media rating methodology at six events, held in the period 2018-2021, using a specialized tool www.public.ru, there have been identifi ed two clusters of activities which differ by an order of magnitude in terms of rating assessment. The fi rst league offorums is the fl agship St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (the undisputed leader), the Russian Investment Forum and the Eastern Economic Forum. In the second league, there are the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum, the Yalta International Economic Forum and the Investment Forum “Russia is Calling!” (corporate initiative of VTB Bank) which are comparable in media rating. At the same time, the article has established the key role of the central media from Moscow and St. Petersburg in covering events at all forums (about 80% of information messages). Structurally, the increased interest of the regional media was noted only in the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum including the news agencies of the region hosting the event. In the context of the considered problem ofgrowing the regional investment forum, related to the involvement of federal structures to promote the event, the authors have put forward the thesis on media rating as an indicator of the necessary and suffi cient information representation of the forum in the media space.