ABSTRACT

APN Australian Regional Media have even codified their audience focus into a ‘Readers First’ policy, which aims to generate news that both responds to and reflects the papers’ readers. Reading habits fluctuate depending on mood, the time of day, where we happen to be reading and what kind of device we’re reading on. And as mobile devices provide almost infinite content at the press of a button or scroll of a finger, more and more categories of reading-states are emerging. Numbers are essential in many stories, but should be used sparingly and precisely. Readers, and journalists for that matter, feel ambivalent about experts. They like them because experts guide their understanding of an issue; they dislike them because by definition experts are distant from the ground level of a story’s action.