What are the advantages and risks of journalists actively working to "market" their content to audiences?

On the one hand, working to target a specific their context to a specific market would allow those who actually care to read your article. On the other hand, people may feel manipulated depanding on how you go about targeting people.

Although tailoring news stories to a wide yet specific audiences may seem efficient and beneficial, even when done well it cannot save newspaper and TV from the ever impressive internet.

Better understanding the lifestyles and in-and-outs of one's preferred audience is perhaps the best way for editors to understand how to effectively design a news package that comprehensively and proportionally fits the needs of their community (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 219).

Instead of worrying to much about "what people want" (which is a very advertising/marketing way of thinking), journalists (as objective watch dogs) need to concern themselves more with the question of "what are people doing?" After all, the job of a journalist is to reports the news, as in what new worthwhile things are happening. More specifically, understand the newspaper's audience reach--this audience for all intensive purposes is the community for which journalists are writing to. Find out what the community is up to, concerned with, etc., write on that, and you will be very successful while managing not to compromise completely your title as a journalist.

Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. "Journalism as a Public Forum." The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Crown, 2001. Print.