What is a paper's audience?

The audience is the person or people who will be reading your work. If you're writing a feature article for a magazine, for instance, your audience consists of the people who typically buy that magazine. Obviously, they're people with some interest in the magazine's usual subject matter. You should also consider age, education level, political beliefs, geographic region, and other factors that affect people's expectations about what they're reading. Think, too, about how much the readers would already know about the subject, so that you neither bore them with needless rehashing, nor talk over their heads.