NEWS SOURCES AGENCIES
The Press Trust of India (PTI)
PTI is India’s premier news agency, headquartered in New Delhi, and is
a nonprofit cooperative of more than 500 Indian newspapers. It
employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost
every district and small town in India. Collectively, they put out more
than 2,000 stories and 200 photographs a day. It’s Hindi service is
called Bhasha. PTI correspondents are based in all important news
centres around the world. It also has tie-ups with several foreign news
agencies. Currently, PTI commands 90% of the new agency market
share in India.
PTI was registered in 1947 and started functioning in 1949. PTI is run by
a Board of Directors, with the Chairmanship going by rotation at the
Annual General Meeting. The day-to-day administration and
management of PTI are headed by the CEO, who is also the Editor-in-
Chief. Its board of directors includes the owners and editors of most of
the leading publications in India, like Vineet Jain, Aveek Sarkar, Viveck
Goenka, N Ravi, etc.
United News of India (UNI)
UNI started its commercial operations on March 21, 1961. It has news
bureaux in all state capitals and other major cities. The agency also has
representatives in key world capitals. UNI was the first to start a multi-
language news service, UNIVARTA, on May 1, 1982, that provides news
services to Hindi newspapers. UNI has been the first and only news
agency in the world to supply news in Urdu since June 5, 1992.The
agency’s subscribers include newspapers published in 14 languages,
AIR, Doordarshan, the Central and State governments, corporate and
commercial houses, and electronic and web-based media.
Indo-Asian News Service (IANS)
IANS was established in 1986, initially to serve as an information
bridge between India and its diaspora in North America. Today, it is a
full-fledged, 24x7 agency based in Delhi-NCR (Noida), putting out real-
time news from India, South Asia, and the news of this region around
the world. IANS is divided into six strategic business units: IANS English,
IANS Hindi, IANS Publishing, IANS Business Consultancy, IANS Solutions,
and IANS Mobile. Its client list includes a range of print publications,
television news channels, websites, ethnic publications abroad,
government ministries, foreign missions, private sector players, and
multilateral institutions.
Asian News International (ANI) ANI is South Asia‘s leading
multimedia news agency, with over 100 bureaux in India, South Asia,
and across the globe. ANI has established itself as a
‘complete content house, providing text, video, and picture content for
TV, print, mobile, and online media. ANI also provides a range of
facilities for foreign and domestic channels to package their reports in
India and uplink via satellite. These include the provision of professional
crews, editing and post-production facilities, access to archives,
uplinking facilities, coordinators, producers, and correspondents, as per
requirement. ANI services include loosely edited news feeds and
customised programmes for television channels, audio bytes for radio
stations, live web casting and streamed multimedia and text content
for websites and mobile carriers, and news wire services for
newspapers, magazines, and websites.
Hindustan Samachar
The Hindusthan Samachar was formed on December 1, 1948, and
provides news in 14 Indian languages. Its subscribers include AIR,
Doordarshan, various state governments, and Nepal Radio. Presently,
the service is being provided in Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati, Nepali, Oriya,
Asamiya, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Sindhi, Sanskrit, Punjabi,
and Bangla. The service is fully based on web-based internet
technology. The subscriber can either download the next or convert it
into email format. In India, this agency has offices in all the states. The
news circulated in all the Indian languages.
TARGET AUDIENCE OF JOURNALISM
Writing to reach your target audience
1. Tip #1: Know yourself. It may sound a bit stupid, because, of
course, you know your business.
2. Tip #2: Know your target audience. The next tip is to know your
target.
3. Tip #3: Speak the same language.
4. Tip #4: Think like your audience.
5. Tip #5: Know where to lead or find your audience.
17 Apr 2015
Who is the audience of newspapers?
There are many factors that vary the audience of a news paper.
Representation
Values
Politics institution
Values
Language
Genre
Narrative
Ideology
Who’s the audience for news?
In some ways, the audience for journalistic messages is the most
concrete and predetermined of the three communications professions’
work. Journalists write for publications or produce reports for media
outlets that have a great deal of information about their subscribers or
viewers. With the ability to track digital readership, journalists know
what articles people read. At the start of the message analysis process,
journalists must ask a set of questions about their target audience that
will help them identify the treatment of the topic about which they will
be writing and make decisions about the kind of reporting they must
do.
Understanding the audience that uses the publication or media outlet
for which they are producing a news report will help clarify some of the
following questions:
• Who reads or views the publication? Who would be interested in
this topic? Who needs to know about this topic? Who is the media
organisation interested in attracting with its offerings?
• WHAT: What would the potential audience member want to know
about the topic? What kind of report would be most informative
or helpful for the audience? What kind of information will be
useful? What does the audience already know about this?
• Where else do people interested in the topic find information?
(For freelancers) Where should I pitch my story idea?
• When does the audience need to get this information? (Is this
fast-breaking news or something that will be used as analysis
after the event?)
• Why does the audience need to know this? Why does the
audience care? Sometimes the audience member just wants to fill
empty minutes with a news message (reading news briefs on a
mobile device while standing in a line or eating alone at a
restaurant). Sometimes the audience member needs to answer a
specific question (who won the baseball game this afternoon?
When does the movie start?). Each of these “why” questions
suggests a different strategy for the communicator.
• How can we best communicate with the audience? How much
background do they need to understand what we are writing
about? How technical can we be? How might the audience react
to this report?
A target audience is the person or group of people a piece of writing is
intended to reach. In other words, it is important for a writer to know
who will be reading his or her writing. This audience is the person or
group of people the writer is aiming for or trying to reach. Identification
of target audiences creates a better return on advertising investment
as it reduces wasteful expenditure on creative and media mixes.
Advertising leakages, i.e., advertising messages going to unintended
audiences, can be harmful. It can trigger a negative effect amongst the
intended audiences (Dahlen & Shojin, 2013). Knowing the target
audience before the conceptualisation of a campaign makes the
creative team use the relevant message theme (in terms of the idea,
story, or situation), advertising appeals (based on audience
motivations), and creative elements (headlines, copy, visuals in print
ads and spoken copy, music, VO, scenes, SFX, VFX, jingles, and camera
shots in audio-visual ads).Deep insights into target audiences also help
in making effective media plans. It also helps in arriving at innovative
media choices and scheduling strategies for brands. No wonder market
strategy, which deals with understanding target markets and classifying
target audiences, comes prior to message and media strategy in an ad
plan
DEFINING AUDIENCE
Rossiter & Percy (1985) i& Percy (1985), in their advertising
communication models, say “a target audience consists of people who
will be most responsive to advertising." As mediated communication
evolves, audiences too need to be redefined. Existing paradigms in
mass media contend that audiences are receivers towards whom the
message is directed. However, the economics of the media industry
presents to us many ways of describing the audience, i.e., audience as
a product and audience as a consumer. The audience means a
consumer who is a potential buyer. So in this case, the audience is the
consumer. Now consider the case of a TV channel. Here, the TV channel
produces the audiences by using its programmes for advertisers. The
advertisers buy the audience of the TV channel, and the channel gets
the revenue. The TV channel must satisfy its consumers, i.e., the
advertisers in this case. Previously, the concept of a mass audience was
relevant. Schramm, in his model of mass communication (as quoted by
Baran
(2010)), refers to the mass audience as a composite of many receivers
involved in the process of decoding, interpreting, and encoding. The
individual receiver is further connected to a bunch where the message
is being decoded and acted upon.
Target Audience
The target audience is a group of people identified as the intended
recipients of a message. And the process of successful communication
is to determine its audience. In this study, the target audience is
divided by demographic, geographic, and psychographic factors. Below,
you can find more details about the targeted audience:
Demographic Age: 19–23 years. According to Jean Piaget’s theory of
cognitive development, during early adulthood, cognition begins to
stabilize. Early adulthood is a time of relativistic thinking, in which
young people begin to become aware of more than simplistic views of
right vs. wrong (Jean, 1997). They begin to look at ideas and concepts
from multiple angles and understand that a question can have more
than one right (or wrong) answer. The need for specialisation results in
pragmatic thinking—using logic to solve real-world problems while
accepting contradiction, imperfection, and other issues. Therefore,
targeting this early adulthood would be a wise choice in order to inform
them about Muslim scholars such as Rumi and others of his kind.
Social Status: Learners or Students Learners and students are in
ages who are active in society and use public facilities, and at this age,
the students are turning to social roles. As they are involved with
academic studies, it would be great if we introduced to them the
important figures of the Islamic world, such as Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi,
especially about his journey of life transformation, which is expected to
inspire someone out there.
Economic status: middle class According to a study by the Asian
Development Bank, the middle class has 93 million people, which is 43
percent of the total population of Indonesia (Kilis 2018). Similarly,
Professor Patrick Bima claims that middle- and upper-middle-class
people enrol their kids in a national private school and send them to a
governmental university, either international, a private university
locally, or a university overseas (Bima, 2018). The middle class is a
group of people living in contemporary society who fall
socioeconomically between the working class and the upper class.
Selecting the middle class as the main target is because it is a vast
group of people who are active members of society.
Types of Audience Segmentation
Each segment has individuals who have similar interests. The interests
of each segment may vary with regard to products. Traditionally, there
were two approaches to market segmentation: product-oriented and
people-oriented. The product-oriented approach measures the
productrelated aspects by segmenting the consumers to understand
the market, and the people-oriented approach measures the people
and relates them to the product (Plummer, 1974). For example, a
cosmetic company can increase their customer base by targeting an
audience of different age groups with products designed to meet their
specific needs. E.g., L’Oreal and Garnier are some of the leading
cosmetic producers that cater to the needs of male and female
customers of their offered goods and services as valuable entities for
their consumer base.opportunityfor Growth: Segmentation helps
identify potential customers who may be interested in our product.
There are four types of segmentation strategies determined because of
their measurability, accessibility, substantiality, and action ability
(Drayton & Tynan, 1978).
Identification of the Target Audience
The business head of Sony Entertainment Television, Danish Khan, says
³ Positioning is all about sacrifice; you can't offer everything to
everybody. The next step is to implement targeting strategies. The
marketer identifies which segment to target and prepares the ways and
means to do so. There are times when a brand decides to target a
particular segment at the introduction stage, gradually including other
target segments as the brand grows or matures. There are various
ways of identifying the target audience and communicating with them.
a) Concentrated Marketing: When a marketer decides to
concentrate on one segment and develops a marketing mix to target it
singularly, it is called concentrated marketing. It is a strategy quite
effective during the decline phase of a product's life cycle, i.e., when
the demand for the product is low and new consumers enter a certain
segment.
b) Sizable: Advertising is aimed at a large section of the population;
hence, the size of the segment is very important. It must be a
significant group to be able to develop a message and media strategy.
Otherwise, targeting a few consumers will make the effort unprovable
for the advertiser.
c) Stable: It is an advantage if the audience is classified on
homogenous variables and is relatively stable, i.e., they do not change
their attitude, lifestyle, and usage patterns swiftly. d) Accessible: It is
important to know beforehand if the advertiser can reach the audience
cluster. One must, however, note that with interactive media, the
advertiser can now disseminate information and reach out to audiences
both vertically and horizontally.
e) Congruence: Every company has a business vision that includes
creating or producing products for a specific set of people. So it is
important that the market segmentation strategy adopted is in line with
the corporate vision and business goals.
b) Differentiated Marketing: When the marketer identifies
multiple segments to target and develops their respective marketing
mixes, it is called differentiated marketing. It is commonly used during
the growth and maturity phases of PLC.
c) Counter segmentation: When two or more identified segments
are combined and a synergistic marketing mix is designed, it is called
counter segmentation. As brand differentiation goes down, this strategy
is becoming critical to ad planning.
