The Imagined Audience for News: Where Does a Journalist’s Perception of the Audience Come From?

In public communication, in the absence of a clear sense of one’s actual audience, a communicator relies on a mental image of an imagined audience. But where does one’s image of the audience come from, and how might that matter for how people evaluate their audience? The case of journalists and their perceptions offers an instructive lens for examining this question, particularly given the digitally mediated changes in the way news audiences are known (e.g., via digital metrics and encounters on social media). Through a survey of U.S. journalists (N = 544), we find that journalists’ views of their audience spring from a complex variety of sources, including interactions via email, social media, and comment sections, as well as relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. These sources carry differing consequences for the evaluations of those audiences—namely, regarding whether journalists perceive their audience as smart (rational) and/or similar to them (homophilous). Results suggest that the origins of journalists’ imagined audiences are a significant factor in shaping journalists’ perception of the people with whom they are communicating, with the concomitant potential to influence the communication itself.