Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The trick to sounding conversational, particularly when reading a script, is to imagine you’re talking to a specific audience member. That’s advice I received years ago at an audio storytelling workshop and remind myself of whenever I’m alone recording narration for a podcast.
The specific listener I’m envisioning is known as the “imagined audience.” As researchers have noted, the less an actual audience is visible or known, the more communicators depend on their imaginations. Because journalists can never know precisely who consumes their work and why they do so, they instead form mental constructions of audiences. That has material consequences.
Journalists often assume that their primary audience is white. Much has been written about how this assumption shapes marketing strategies and editorial decisions. Less attention has been paid to how the imagined audience influences journalists’ appearance and vocal delivery. This topic interests me as a professor who teaches podcasting and studies self-presentation norms.
Listeners and viewers have many things competing for their attention. They have more media options than ever before. Journalists and their advisers are acutely aware that audiences are in control. “You’re a guest in someone’s house, and that someone can uninvite you quickly by the press of a button,” an audio storytelling instructor often told students. “If you don’t engage [audiences] in a few seconds, they tune you out,” a former public radio executive warned journalists. According to a radio programmer’s adage, it takes years to build an audience and only a few seconds to drive them away.
This perception of audiences as easily distracted and inundated with options puts pressure on journalists to avoid attracting unwanted attention to themselves. Aspects of self-presentation that lead audiences to focus more on the messenger than the message are commonly flagged as a concern. “If someone is paying more attention to how you’re saying something than what you’re saying, it’s an issue,” a radio news director/voice coach said. “If people can’t get past your look, they aren’t going to hear a word you say,” an image consultant commented. Journalists who distract audiences don’t last long on air, many advisers noted, though one commented, “if the content is interesting, you forget about whatever the heck was distracting you.”
Journalists I interviewed understood the need to avoid ill-fitting attire, intricate patterns, flashy accessories, filler words, excessive gesturing, and anything else that audiences, regardless of their identity, would find distracting. Yet journalists from historically marginalized groups felt the term “distracting” was often used euphemistically, masking critiques of their social identity. Women and journalists of color were particularly prone to hearing concerns about how their accent, pitch, pronunciation, hairstyle, wardrobe, and even their names could become a distraction.
Determining what’s distracting can be a subjective evaluation. The question is: distracting to whom?
Throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, news consultants were clear about who television journalists should consider as their core audience: those in the upper part of the lower class and lower part of the middle class, known as the “middle majority.” 1974 research from McHugh and Hoffman, the first and most prominent television news consulting firm, showed that these blue-collar viewers, many of whom were white, preferred newscasters who were “conventionally dressed, neat and well-groomed.” Viewers generally perceived middle-aged white male newscasters as most authoritative and often criticized journalists of color for not appearing “clean cut” unless they conformed to white beauty standards.
Decades later, despite research showing that audiences wanted more diverse representation than the narrow version of beauty offered in television news, most journalists continued to abide by “very predictable, stereotypically heteronormative” appearance standards. A 2018 study found that nearly all female journalists had straight, shoulder-length hair, minimal jewelry and wore modest, monochrome tops. Men generally had short hair, were clean-shaven and wore a blazer and tie, although the range of appearance standards was wider for men than women.
Viewer tastes also shaped how journalists talk. In the 1970s, when stoic anchors with booming voices were the norm, “middle majority” viewers told news consultants they preferred journalists who sounded warm and conversational. They also praised journalists who spoke without discernible accents. The supposedly neutral, accentless news anchor voice became the standard in broadcasting due largely to an influential linguist who implicitly endorsed how he and other white, upper-middle-class Northeast Ohioans spoke as the model.
Research suggests that television news remains most popular among less-educated audiences. Viewers are racially diverse, but the imagined viewer often isn’t. An Asian television journalist recalled that at her former station, a photo of the target audience member — a white, suburban, middle-aged mother — was pinned to a conference room wall. Wherever the journalist worked, she knew the target viewer profile, and it “never reflected someone who looked like me.” She said in local television news, “you’re trained very early to know that your audience is probably white, probably in the suburbs, and probably middle class.”
In public radio, research from the late twentieth century showed that the core audience was well-educated, wealthy, and middle-aged. That listeners were predominantly white was unintentional, according to a former public radio executive. “It’s not like public radio said in the 1970s, ‘Oh, we want to make sure only white people get access to our content.’ It was all based on education level. Public radio has been looking back and asking, ‘What did we unintentionally do? Who has had access to higher education?’” Another executive felt that public radio “succeeded by targeting affluent, highly educated white folks at the exclusion of people of color.”
A former public radio manager said she never told journalists “you don’t sound educated enough.” Nor did she think news directors ever said “you have to be understandable to our old white audience.” Yet some journalists felt their colleagues had this demographic in mind when telling them “you don’t want to distract the audience with how you sound” or “make sure the audience gets these references.” A former radio journalist said that local station managers were “terrified” of scaring off white listeners, who were their biggest donors. As a former NPR executive noted, even though white Baby Boomers no longer represent the majority of listeners, “they still have a stranglehold on public radio’s programming.”
That’s less the case for public radio-affiliated podcasts and podcasting in general, which tends to attract younger, more diverse listeners. When a journalist left public radio to start her own podcast studio, the listener she and her colleagues imagined was a 26-year-old Afro-Latina daughter of immigrant parents who is the first in her family to graduate college — the kind of listener that audience research showed “wasn’t being served well by traditional radio.”
Data on how audiences evaluate on-air talent is costly to collect, and it’s unclear how much these evaluations affect ratings. Therefore, many stations no longer invest heavily in such research and rely more on other measures of audience sentiment. Many journalists dismiss e-mails and online comments about their appearance and vocal delivery. Yet research shows that these types of communications help journalists identify their audience and what they are thinking. Newsroom leaders described unsolicited audience feedback as useful but unscientific.
Criticism seems to drown out praise, although researchers have not studied which is more commonplace. Female television journalists disproportionately heard complaints about their appearance, and Hispanic/Latino journalists were often criticized for selective use of accents.
A former voice coach said white public radio listeners commonly complained about Black journalists’ vocal delivery. “There was definitely a sense that if you didn’t sound like NPR, then you were possibly uneducated, which was a criticism leveled especially at people of color.” Women in public radio were often told that they sounded unpleasant and unserious.
Public radio managers took these types of audience complaints seriously for a long time, thinking that “if one listener complained that probably represents the views of dozens of listeners,” said a former program director. “What we’ve learned over the years is that no matter what you do, there’s going to be a small passionate group of people that will give you negative feedback about everything you do, and you can’t overreact to that negative feedback.”
Journalists observed that managers often felt pressure to act on unsolicited criticism because they were “terrified for their jobs” and worried about alienating audiences. A television journalist said that “it all comes down to who the manager is and whether they are willing to take risks” by allowing journalists to challenge conventions.
Because audience tastes can be difficult to ascertain, those in managerial or advisory roles commonly position themselves as audience representatives, trusting their instincts and intuition on what’s appealing and distracting. Journalists observed a problematic lack of diversity among managers and advisers. Some had never worked with non-white voice coaches or image consultants. Consistent with research on newsroom demographics, journalists primarily had white male managers. A former television news director said managers often commissioned audience research but dismissed findings that did not align with preferred narratives. They instead relied on gut feeling. He found evaluation of on-air talent to be “very biased,” reflecting what appealed to white managers.
Journalists felt that managers were often out of touch with listeners. “They’d say, ‘If I can’t understand [a speaker], then maybe the rest of our audience can’t,” a former producer recalled. “If your ear hasn’t been trained to hear certain types of voices, you’re going struggle to understand them or think they sound too strange,” a former radio journalist said. A podcast host said that without diverse management, “you end up defaulting to one type of listener as your primary audience, and that listener is going to reflect the person making the product.”
Many journalists initially felt the need to appeal to managers and the imagined audience by hiding their accent, toning down their delivery, changing or anglicizing their name, dressing conventionally, and maintaining a consistent appearance. Once established in their careers, they felt better-positioned to challenge assumptions about audiences that they felt were outdated.
A Black television journalist who for years avoided natural hairstyles because she was told that viewers cannot trust journalists who change their appearance eventually stopped following that advice. “The only people who have a problem with ‘inconsistency’ are white managers, and the comment is usually directed at a Black woman who’s switching up her hair,” she said, arguing that “switching up your look is not distracting because [viewers] are already distracted.”
Journalists urged audiences to be open-minded. A former host who was criticized for using Spanglish on his podcast said, “I’m a product of my life. If you don’t like who I am, that’s on you, not me.” A radio journalist felt that “listeners should be smart enough to know that the world sounds different. If they’re distracted, that’s on them.” A voice coach said audiences have to sort through their biases and prejudices and “not be hyper-critical of someone who is a good communicator but just might look or sound different.”
Research shows that exposure to different types of voices and appearance attributes can help reduce bias and stigma. News outlets can help normalize diverse forms of self-presentation and attract audiences who have previously felt unrepresented. Many are vowing to do so, though as one journalist noted, even when public radio stations promise to target diverse communities, “there’s always a sentence in there about ‘and maintain our current audience.'”
Progress is slow, but the imagined audience may finally be expanding.
Elia Powers is an associate professor of mass communication at Towson University and author of Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality (Rutgers University Press). He’s also a sports, features, and podcast editor at the Baltimore Watchdog; an independent podcast reporter, producer and host; and a proud Seattle native who lives in Washington, D.C.
