A recent study conducted by the PR agency Edelman identified 140 opinion leaders in Beijing, Shanghai, & Guangzhou. They conducted 40 minute face to face interviews with each of them. The respondents were in media, government, business, NGOs and other fields. Each one was asked about their levels of trust in different institutions such as the media, government, NGOs, foreign and domestic companies.
In China, they found that Internet media was the second most trusted source of news, after TV but before newspapers. China was also the most blog aware country in the Asia Pacific region, with 88% of respondents saying that they had either blogged themselves or visited blogs.
We talked to Alan VanderMolen, Edelman’s President for the Asia Pacific region, who explained some of the findings.
Disclosure: your correspondent does occasional research work for Edelman, but was not involved in this study.
This video is also available on Danwei TV, a Chinese subtitled version will be available there soon.
- Edelman: Key findings from China
- Edelman: Asia-Pacific findings
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