In recent years, communications scholars have taken a renewed interest in analyzing the audience and its impact on the communication process, for example, Ang (1991) in Desperately Seeking the Audience, Neuman (1991) in The Future of the Mass Audience, and Ettema and Whitney (1994c) in Audiencemaking: Media Audiences as Industrial Process. Similarly, news editors and producers have often turned toward a marketing orientation that seeks to give news readers and viewers what they want, or at least what they say they want. Yet, there still has been little written about just how the audience factors into the news that is produced. In this book, I seek to fill that niche. I argue that audience images are quite important in the construction of news, but are not easily detected. That is because journalists are not principally interested in their audience; they are interested in the news.
Traditionally, when media scholars have tried to describe the role audience members play in the construction of news texts, they have started by asking reporters their impression of audience members, and then gauged how accurate those journalists' impressions of the audience were when patterned against demographic data. Generally, the results were discouraging. Reporters did not seem to have an accurate impression of their audience. Journalists had under-
