Telling a story implies an audience. Defining news-which is the content of the journalist’s story involves determining the relationship between events and the interests of your public. Thus the concepts of story and news are inseparable from an awareness of audience or reader.
You may dream of writing the Big Story that will be read by everyone in the world, but it’s only a dream. Even the most important international stories reach only a fraction of the world’s population. And usually reporters write for a far more limited audience: the readers, listeners, or viewers in a precisely defined geographical area. The newspaper or broadcast station’s first goal is to serve its own trade area. Most stories, therefore, are primarily of local or regional interest. The community-its economy, geography, history, traditions, and ethnic composition-plays a large role in determining what constitutes news. For example, a story from Cuba presumably is more important to people in nearby Miami than it would be to Kansans. And a story from Oslo or Stockholm will attract more readers in Minneapolis, with that city’s large population of Scandinavian descent, than it would in Houston, New Orleans, or Santa Fe. Similarly, a change in the price of gold automatically is top priority news in Lead, South Dakota, whose only industry is the Home stake Gold Mine. And the price of corn means more in Iowa than in California.
No community, of course, is an entirely homogeneous group of people. Instead, it consists of many small publics within the general public. Each of these special groups is united by a common bond of interest, And to build and hold mass circulation, newspapers must recognize the particular interests of each group-blue-collar workers” farmers, businessmen, the aged, ethnic minorities, the poor, sports fans, youth, house- wives, parents of school children, the family and friends of the bride. Reporters soon learn to write for numerous publics with interests they may not share.
Interests Shared by All: Regardless of their different interests, all our readers and listeners are human beings, and they are alike in all ways that one human being is like another. No study of the reporter’s audience is complete, therefore, without some examination of what writers call “the human condition.”
Lawrence Durrell wrote four novels known collectively as The Alexandria Quartet, in which he attempted to demonstrate that in the final analysis all things will be shown true of all people. Perhaps Durrell’s is an overstatement, hut psychologists agree that all humans are much alike, that they are both rational and emotional, that they live in a constant state of conflict between self and society, that they are always struggling to reduce the tension of this conflict. Humans are basically selfish, yearning for freedom yet realizing that without social order no individual can be free. They know they are mortal, that someday they must die, a truth against which they constantly rebel. Since they can’t attain physical immortality, their alternative goal is to live as long and as well as they can.. Most people want love and affection, recognition for their achievements, and status among their peers. All want to be healthy, and most want to prosper.
To summarize, all humans want a longer, healthier, and happier life both for themselves and their children, who may be their only ticket to immortality. And, perhaps unconsciously, they expect the media to supply information that will help them attain these goals. Primarily, people want stories that will:
- Warn of imminent Physical danger-an outbreak of war or local violence, an approaching storm, an epidemic, an unsafe product, or adulterated food.
- Report developments that promise to extend life-a peace agreement, a medical discovery, improvements in hospital facilities, a new system of keeping physically fit. .
- Expose threats to individual freedom-political oppression, economic injustice, infringements of civil rights.
- Help them improve their economic or political position-simple informative stories about business developments and the employment situation, or explanatory or even instructive stories about managing investments, preparing for retirement, juggling the family budget, or preparing the tax returns. A political or economic feature even may be a success story about a person the reader dreams of emulating.
- Describe improvements or deterioration in the quality of living – urban decay, the crime rate, vanishing wildlife, advancements in housing and recreation, changing mores, improvements in clothing and cooking.
- Tell what is happening or is expected to happen to their children – readers want to know what kind of world their children will live in and how educators are preparing them for it.
