Lesson 5: Your audience is always large, you never know who it'll effect.

"I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another."-Dick Cavett

One thing journalists unconsciously do is create a story or something to be shared without thinking further beyond an audience. Yes, you do think about it early in the process, but with deadlines quickly approaching you tend to lose sight of the bigger picture, of who will be reading it and who it'll affect. A lot of stories (not all) can blow past this quite easily as they aren't as effective as other stories, but when you do get a feature story that is rather large, you always have to keep in mind an audience and the effect of it on a wide scale.

It seems kind of odd that you never really think about your audience until later in the process. Whenever I write a story, I tend to write out everything than worry about who it is intended too. I feel bad that I do this, but being a high school journalist its hard to think about audience throughout the whole process. Last year, I wrote a story about how a coach from another school in the district passed away, it was a hard enough story to write, but one thing I kept in my mind the whole time was who would be reading this? Of course, everybody at our school would be reading but the fact that it'd be extending out to the other school it was hard to imagine who would be reading it. It seems that the audience can truly slip your mind but you have to keep track on who you are writing for.

Along with just thinking about the audience inside the school, it's hard to think that parents are also the ones reading these stories. I know for a fact both my parents love the Friday's that we get our magazines out because they look forward to reading them. It doesn't really matter with smaller stories, but when you get feature stories and editorials that are debatable then you start to reconsider your options on what parents/teachers will see the story.

Overall, audience is a big part of any publication especially a newspaper and magazine. You truly never know how far out it'll extend and who will see your work and that is one thing you need to keep in your mind. Same goes for any work that you do even artistic, literature, and anything else. Always keep your audience in mind, no matter what it is.