Speaking the language of market segmentation: How newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience

Abstract

News organizations are placing a greater emphasis on knowing their audience as a route to facilitate engagement and generate revenue. Drawing on a national survey of individuals working for U.S. news organizations, we examine how newsworkers describe their organization’s target audience. Combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses, we find that the majority of U.S. newsworkers use some combination of demographics or psychographics to describe the audience for their work—representing a substantial uptake of marketing segmentation language compared to earlier research on how journalists understand their audiences. However, that marketing-like sophistication comes with a cost: Newsworkers' target audience descriptions are shaped by financial imperatives, emphasizing white, older, high socioeconomic status groups. These findings are discussed in terms of the journalism industry’s lack of diversity, suggesting that this issue also extends to the imagined target audiences of news media organizations.