Abstract:

The quantitative mix of a publication's editorial matter undoubtedly plays a basic role in pre-determining the reader's profile and consequently its circulation. I have intentionally inverted the two elements, because circulation is a function of the type of audience to which a publication is addressed. The quantitative mix of a publication's contents is however an extremely crude measure of evaluating contents and in any case there are two big unknown areas: a) the classification of contents; b) a classification of readers on the basis of characteristics that show a high correlation to certain types of contents. As far as I know, no studies have yet been carried out in Italy aimed at finding a relationship between contents of publications and their respective audiences.