城市实体特征对城市网络空间影响力的作用机制——基于互联网新闻媒体的分析

Impacts of City's Characteristics on City's Importance in the Virtual World: An Empirical Analysis Based on Internet News Media

借助百度新闻媒体指数功能,收集281个地级市或以上城市在2011~2014年间的媒体指数,分析基于互联网新闻媒体的城市网络空间影响力差异及其变化。其次,通过对面板数据的回归分析,从政府因素与市场因素两个方面探讨城市在实体空间中的特征(或传统影响力)是如何作用到城市在网络空间中的影响力。并且,通过对各年数据的回归分析,进一步考察政府因素与市场因素作用机制的演化过程。

Along with the rapid development of information and communication technologies, the Internet has functioned as an important news media in people＇s day-to-day lives. As the centers of flows of people, goods,information, and capital, cities have been frequently appeared in the Internet news media. However, the number of reports about city in the Internet news media is not evenly distributed for every city; instead, the distribution shows huge gaps among cities and reveal the disparity among city＇s importance in the Internet. By collecting and analyzing the yearly Media Index of 281 prefectural-level and above cities in Baidu, the most popular search engine website in China, this current study firstly analyzed city＇s importance and its changes in the period 2011-2014. By adopting panel data regression model this study then explained how the importance of cities in the Internet is related to its characteristics in government and market perspectives. Finally, the evolution of the influence power of government and market factors was explored from the regression model results of each year. The main conclusions can be addressed as follows. 1） There are huge gaps in the amount of coverage of cities in the Internet news media, exhibiting obvious hierarchical and spatial variation of city＇s importance in the Internet. However, both variations constantly and gradually dropped in the period 2011-2014. 2） The amount of coverage of cities in the Internet news media has been heavily determined by the city＇s government factor（i.e., city＇s status in the hierarchical administration system） and market factor including population size,economic development performance, tourism resource, and the spatial distance from the national media center.Specifically, our panel data regression model shows that provincial-level city, city with a larger population size, a larger GDP per capita, being a national-level historical and cultural city, a closer distance from Beijing（the national media center） tends to have more chances to be reported in the Internet news media. 3） Interestingly, through regression models on the impacts of the abovementioned variable of each year, results demonstrate that the impact of government factor decreased while that of market factor increased, indicating the role of Internet in promoting economic growth in government＇s recent development strategy.