The article presents a comparative analysis of activity of the Russian regional and federal television, as well as the author's documentary cinematography, covering the life of the Russian regions. Accordingly, the objects of research are television and documentary cinematography, and the subject includes the differences in the tools that they use in the mentioned activity. The relevance of the topic is due to new phenomena, connected with the growing interest of screen media not in the distant countries, as before, but in the life of their own country and its separate territories. Various scientific approaches to the differentiation of television programs are considered, special cycles are described, their peculiarities, advantages and disadvantages are identified. One of the article's sections is devoted to identifying the differences between television and cinema, involving the opinions of respected domestic and foreign scientists. The empirical material for writing the article was activity of the Russian regional and federal TV channels, creative work of several domestic TV hosts and documentary film directors, as well as the work to establish interaction between the regional film communities in order to promote the regional documentary cinema to the audience. As a result, trends were identified that appeared in the pattern of covering the life of the regions by different media; differences in approaches to the problem of "author and hero" on television and in the cinema were indicated. In a situation when the regional television is clearly losing to the regional cinema, the audience's demand for which is growing, television is recommended to switch to the regular screenings of the author's documentary cinema in order to improve its own programming policy away from "formularity" and entertainment to more meaningful creative solutions.