A Study On Regional Image Of Gansu Province

Nowadays, the world is an attention economic era. In this background, the regional image as a soft power is very import, especially for a region's progress. But in this information globalization era, regional image is more reflected by the mass media, even shaped by it. So, it is very important to know the media image of a region to improve and shape the actual image of the region.Based on this background, this paper concentrates on the current media image of Gansu Province. Gansu province is an important northwestern industrial region and has been experienced ten years of West Development. The aim of this paper is to draw the outline of the regional image of Gansu in the media and find the problems of the media's communication, and then proposed some advice to improve the regional image of Gansu in the mass media.This research is a quantitative research, which based on samples selected from "People's Daily", "Southern Metropolis Daily", "Lanzhou Morning Post" in two years from 2009 to 2010, trying to reveal the regional image of Gansu through comparing the internal media and external media, the metropolitan papers and the party newspapers.The results show that, the images of Gansu province are positive in Lanzhou Morning Post and People's Daily, though the first one is intra-area media and the later one is extra-area media. However, the differences of the media properties lead to the different topics that the media focused on. In Lanzhou Morning Post, more than half of the topics are social ones, however, in People's Daily, the number of social topics is least while the political topics is most if the reports on Zhouqu mud-rock flow are excluded.Though both Lanzhou Morning Post and Southern Metropolis Daily are Metropolis daily papers, they showed opposite media image of Gansu province. Lanzhou Morning Post, as an intra-area media, showed a positive local image because local government is actively setting the agenda. But Southern Metropolis Daily, as an extra-area media, with the natural preference to bad news, showed a negative image of Gansu province.Comparing the present media image of Gansu province that reflected from those three media with the expected image which reflected on government documents and stated as "strong industrial province, big cultural province and civilized ecological province", it finds out that they are closest in People's Daily, they are only similar in the part of "big cultural province" in Lanzhou Morning post, and they are completely different in Southern Metropolis Daily.