News audiences: targeting, reception and interpretation

Overview

Recall questions on demographic and psychographic profiling, the social grades of the set newspapers' readers, uses and gratifications, Stuart Hall's reader positions, Gerbner's cultivation theory and mean world syndrome, Bandura, filter bubbles and echo chambers, and online audience figures.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Distinguish demographic from psychographic audience profiling.

   Model answer

   Demographics classify readers by measurable characteristics such as age, gender, income and social grade, while psychographics group them by attitudes, values and lifestyle, such as aspirers or the socially concerned.

2. 2

   What are social grades, and how are the two set newspapers' readerships placed on them?

   Model answer

   Social grades classify people from A and B in professional and managerial work through C1 and C2 to D and E, and the liberal quality title's readership is weighted towards A, B and C1 while the mid-market tabloid draws more broadly across B, C1 and C2.

3. 3

   State the four categories of the uses and gratifications model.

   Model answer

   Surveillance or information, personal identity, personal relationships and social interaction, and diversion or entertainment.

4. 4

   Apply the uses and gratifications model to a reader using a news app on a commute.

   Model answer

   They gain surveillance from the headlines, diversion from the celebrity and sport, material for conversation at work from the big story, and confirmation of personal identity from a columnist whose values match their own.

5. 5

   What are Hall's three reader positions?

   Model answer

   The dominant or preferred reading, in which the audience accepts the intended meaning; the negotiated reading, in which they broadly accept it while resisting parts that clash with their own experience; and the oppositional reading, in which they understand the intended meaning and reject it.

6. 6

   Give an example of an oppositional reading of a news front page.

   Model answer

   A reader who works in the public sector may see a splash attacking pay demands as evidence of the paper's hostility to workers rather than as the exposure of greed the page intends, and read the whole front page as propaganda.

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