An audience profile is vital within the planning stages as my group and I have to

understand what kind of news stories will interest our listeners. It will give us an
understanding and insight of what our listeners do within their day and what our
place is a part of their day. As well as this it will help us answer the question, why
they watch the news. Yes they watch the news, because they simply have to
know the recent events that are happening around the world. But we want to be
able to identify if our audience watch our news for entertainment, research and
more.
In terms of age we decided to aim to reach an audience of 15 to early twenties.
We wanted to reach a fairly young audience as were young ourselves, so we
want our audience to be able to relate to us as news journalists and be able to
identify with the stories we broadcast. (Uses and gratification theory)
We knew immediately that we wanted to broadcast to a mass audience rather
than a niche audience as we wanted to appeal to a range of audiences. We will
do this by airing a wide variety of stories such as sports stories, celebrity stories,
political stories and more. We also want this audience to be an active audience.
(Uses and gratification theory). In order to ensure our audience is being active
we can add things that are interactive like make them send their opinions and
views on a story we air (decoding theory), or simply say things such as help us
get this trending.
On the basis of demographics we intend to reach people under the
demographics of E (for example the unemployed, students), D (semi-skilled
manual workers), C2 (builders), also C1 (nurses and junior managers) and lastly
B (teachers). Demographics allow us to define our audience by the work they do
as statistically 13% of the demographic group B, 22% of the demographic group
C1, 33% of the demographic group C2, 20% of the demographic group D and 9%
of the demographic group E will listen to our news cast.
Furthermore, in terms of psychographics we wish to target an audience of
egoists- those who seek pleasure as we can fulfil this by entertaining them,
innovators-those who wish to make their mark which we can help them do by
encouraging them to interact with our news stories, utopians-those who want the
world to be a better place, we can inform them about upsetting news stories
giving them ideas about how they can help make the world a better place,
cynics-those who have something to complain about, were sure we can give
them something to complain about as they wont agree with all our opinions, also
mainstreamers as they seek security, explorers as they seek discovery,
strugglers because they seek escape and lastly reformers as they seek
enlightenment which we can provide.
The uses and gratification theory applies to our news story as people will turn to
our news stories in order to satisfy themselves. For example people can listen to
us for entertainment, information, to escape, to get educated about a subject,
social interaction and finally for identification. For instance a person may watch
our celebrity news broadcast so they can discuss it with their friends. This is an

example of social interaction. The uses and gratification theory also infers a
highly active audience use of the media which we aim for.
Moreover the reception/decoding theory also applies to our news stories as the
audience will interpret our news stories differently. For example if we
broadcasted a news story on refugees in London, some will give a negative view
on it and some will see it as a positive thing. We will be able to see how people
decode stories differently when they interact with our news stories.