Constructing the audience: a study of segmentation in the Danish press

No more than twenty years ago, the doors between the newsrooms and the marketing departments of Danish newspapers were tightly shut. Today, all major Danish newspapers work with reader profiles using marketing data to create journalistic concepts. This article identifies two dominant reader constructions in policy papers of Danish newspapers: the reader-as-citizen, which can be traced back to the late 1940s, and the reader-as-consumer, visible in the historically new reader profiles, where we also find a third reader construction, the reader-as-commodity. The development indicates a transformation from an Omnibus press system with a publicist logic of practice to a Segment press system with a commercial logic of practice.