Speaking the language of market segmentation: How newsworkers describe their organization's target audience.

This article examines how U.S. newsworkers describe their organizations' target audiences amid an industry shift toward audience-centric strategies, using data from a national survey conducted in late 2020. It finds that most newsworkers employ marketing segmentation language—focusing on demographics (age, race, income, education) and psychographics (interests, values)—to characterize their audiences, with a predominant emphasis on older, white, affluent, and highly educated groups. While some respondents acknowledge a gap between their current audience and a more diverse, inclusive ideal, economic pressures and commercial logics often reinforce targeting privileged segments, limiting audience diversity. The study highlights how these audience conceptions influence newsroom decisions and reflect broader challenges related to equity and representation in journalism.