The article considers the functioning of abbreviations, which represent an open and mobile semiotic system of secondary nomination, in the titles of media articles - the most informative components of news media discourse. A comparative language study was conducted on the material of 375 titles (125 units each in English, Japanese and Russian) with the applications of such methods as differential sampling, semantic categorization and linguistic analysis. It was revealed that the subject matter of headlines containing abbreviations reflects a wide range of issues, which are listed here in the descending order: politics, sports, finance, education, culture, economics, social sphere, crime, technology, medicine, among others. The semantic core of the abbreviations consists of organization names and toponyms; whereas the names of events, technologies, positions, concepts, vehicles, unions, associations, systems, infrastructure facilities, among others, are on the semantic periphery. In the English and Russian titles, three-component initial abbreviations of the consonant type predominate, while in the Japanese language, two-component abbreviations consisting of two hieroglyphs prevail. A significant proportion of the abbreviations in Japanese and Russian are represented by those from the English language, borrowed with the application of the non-translatable method of semantisation in order to preserve their high degree of recognition. The tendency to economize on linguistic resources is manifested to a greater extent on the material of the Japanese and English languages (the average value of abbreviations equals 1.4 and 1.3, respectively) and to a lesser degree on the material of the Russian language (the average value of 1.02).