In the interest of applying reader response theory to journalism this paper posits that readers of newspapers, like readers of literature, take an active role in making meaning from the articles they read, rather than passively accepting news as a finished, static product. Additionally, it proposes that journalism textbooks pay little attention to the role of the reader, hence affecting the way future journalists will write. Specific areas addressed in the paper are: (1) the news as narrative, which discusses two views of the structure of news stories; (2)audience approaches in cultural studies, which offers various notions of how audiences go about interpreting news articles; (3)literary reader response theories; (4) inter-media differences, which examines the differences in roles of readers of literature and viewers of film and television; (5) the role of readers in journalism textbooks; and (6) "New Journalism" as metalanguage. The paper concludes that by incorporating reader response theory in journalism education, and changing the way journalists think, they may come to understand how readers differ from one another, how they differ from reporters, and how reporters and readers together make meaning, while the study of the linguistic and conceptual forms used by real people to give meaning to their situations would offer journalists new rhetorical tools. (Endnotes and a 53-item bibliography are appended.) (JC)