A research team led by Prof Chen Huailin and Prof Wu Mei which includes Dr Li Xiaoqin and a dozen master’s and PhD students from the Department of Communication, University of Macau (UM), has successfully completed the consultancy project “Guangzhou Daily 2012 Survey and Research Project” and earned unanimous praise from the middle and top management of the Guangzhou Daily Group, the mainland’s top three print media by circulation and No. 1 by advertising sales.
Based on random door-to-door surveys of nearly 1,700 households in Guangzhou, Foshan and Dongguan, as well as in-depth interviews with the newspaper’s middle management and focus groups of readers, the research not only identified in an accurate and original manner the newspapers’ target audience, but also revealed for the first time the newspaper’s agenda-setting effects on various kinds of major public events.
Guangzhou Daily started inviting tenders for its audience survey and research project in the first quarter of 2012, in an attempt to formulate future development strategies to cope with the fierce competition from old and new media in the Pearl River Delta region. UM’s Department of Communication stood out from the rest of bidders, all of which are leading audience survey organisations in the Greater China region, and was finally awarded the project through anonymous voting by the Editor-in-Chief’s Office and the newspaper’s top management, for their original research design, international-standard research team and competitive price.
Over the past decade Guangzhou Daily has awarded numerous foreign and joint-venture audience survey companies to completed five audience survey research projects, and despite the extensive statistical data yielded from those projects, they fell considerably short of the newspaper’s expectations in terms of forward-lookingness because their research basically revolved around two concepts of “media reach” and “satisfaction rate”. What sets the research findings of UM team apart is their innovative design and expert analysis which has transformed this audience survey project into an unprecedented research providing a road map for the newsroom reform and strategic development of the newspaper.
Should you have any inquiries about the press release, please feel free to contact Ms. Veronica Tang at（853）8397 4323 or prs.media@um.edu.mo or visit UM webpage www.umac.mo.
