The paper determines the nature of media speech. Its main property is its direct involvement in the general
practical activity of society. The concept of the communicative status of the text is introduced. The status
of the current text assumes that the text is read immediately after its publication. The status of the text of
the past tense suggests that the text is considered to have lost direct connection with practical everyday life,
but not lost informational connection with society. The status of a cognitive text has texts that have lost
touch with society and belong to the field of knowledge, where media texts exist only as artifacts of their
era. The communicative properties of the essay are analyzed in detail. The essay receives cognitive value
thanks to figurative speech, the basis of which is graphic art. The semantic specificity of identifying
vocabulary, the main visual medium, ensures that the media text-cognitive is included in the general fund
of texts that form the foundation of national culture. The essay has rich intertextual links with both
traditional verbal texts and texts based on other sign systems, as well as with polycode texts. It is shown in
the work that only an essay having the status of a cognitive text can be considered in terms of the category
of chronotope. The content of the theoretical principles, the legitimacy of the conclusions drawn are based
on the analysis of V. Peskov’s essay “A Night at the Mill”.