Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry--including profound financial instability and public distrust--is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? What is the connection between what journalists think about their audiences and what they do to reach them? Perhaps most importantly, how aligned are these "imagined" audiences with the real ones? Imagined Audiences draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to reveal how journalists' assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. He concludes by drawing on audience studies research to compare journalism's "imagined" audiences with actual observations of news audience behavior. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a moment when the relationship between the two has grown more important than ever before.

Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry--including profound financial instability and public distrust--is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises the question: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? Imagined Audiences explores how journalists' assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. In doing so, the book examines the role that audiences traditionally have played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public.

In this illuminating work, Jacob L. Nelson complicates the notion that 'engagement' with audiences alone will save the press. Imagined Audiences asks newsrooms to get real about trust-building obstacles, accept that news audiences are ultimately unknowable, and combine approaches-including engagement-toward relevancy. Read it all the way to the end: You will not be disappointed and might even come away with an idea for how to fix news media.