Secondary Reference Groups and the Public
Whatever their subliminal "images" and "fantasies," newspapermen have little contact with the general public and receive almost no feedback from it. Communica tion through newspapers is far less intimate than through specialized journals, hindi mein samachar
whose writers and readers belong to the same professional group. I have received many more responses from articles in scholarly journals with tiny readerships than from front page stories in The Times that must have been read by half a million persons. samachar hindi
Even well-known reporters do not receive more than one or two letters a week from their readers, and very few reporters are really well known. The public rarely reads by-lines and is not apt to know that Smith has taken over the city-hall beat from Jones. It may be misleading to talk of "the public" as if it were a meaningful entity, just as it is inadequate, according to diffusion studies, to conceive of a "mass" audience of undifferentiated, atomistic individuals. The management of The Times assumes that its readers consist of heterogeneous groups: housewives, lawyers, educators, Jews, suburbanites, and so on. It calculates that certain groups will read certain parts of the paper, and not that a hypothetical general reader will read everything. It therefore encourages specialization among reporters. It hires a physician to cover medical news; it sends a future Supreme Court reporter to law school for a year; and it constantly opens up new beats such as advertising, architecture, and folk music. A serious sociology of newswriting ought to trace the evolution of beats and the branching out of specializations. It might also profit from the market research done by newspapers themselves, wh
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