MEDIALOGIA CONDUCTS MEDIA RESEARCH ON EXPERT CENTRES

A round-table discussion on "New Manoeuvrings in the Run-up to the 2007-2008 Elections" was held at the AiF press centre on October 10. This meeting of leading political, social scientists and public relations professionals focused on the media research on expert centres conducted by Medialogia. Medialogia and the Russian Centre for Current Politics produced rankings of top centres that focus on political science, social science, economics and public relations, and also foreign centres, based on their mass media reference statistics in 2006 and 2007. The research used the Medialogia mass media analysis and monitoring system and was based on news items from over 3,000 Russian mass media sources including TV, radio, printed media, news agencies and the web. Most participants agree that, to a large extent, the findings reflect the real situation in the market for social and political research. According to Sergey Markov, Director of the Institute for Political Research, "there have been no comprehensive research on this segment, even though the Russian market still has capacity for more political and social research centres, compared with other countries going through the same phase in their development as Russia. So Medialogia's rankings based on media sources are a positive development as they enable centres to see how the mass media and the society view them and their competitors."Summing up the meeting, Mikhail Vinogradov, General Director of the Russian Centre for Current Politics called for further research on the media activity of expert centres and a qualitative assessment of their mass media reference statistics. Sergey Markov, Igor Bunin (General Director of the Centre for Political Technologies), Nikolay Sapronov (Marketing Research Director of the PROPAGANDA Centre for Communications Technologies) and Igor Eidman (Communications Director of the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre) confirmed their involvement as experts in the second phase of the research to be conducted in January 2008. Rankings of expert centres based on their mass media reference statistics· Top expert centres by mass media reference statistics · Rankings of analytical political science centres · Rankings of public relations centres · Rankings of academic institutions in the field of social and political research · Rankings of foreign centres · Rankings of economics centres · Rankings of social science centres