Includes index

"The news industry faces profound financial instability and public distrust. Many believe the solution to these ongoing crises 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 important, how aligned are these "imagined" audiences with the real ones? Imagined Audiences draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to show how journalists' assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. In doing so, it 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.