Know who you are writing for
Before writing, ask who the audience is, what it needs and what it already knows. These answers shape the angle, language, length and explanations. Writing for a real reader is especially important when borrowed professional models encourage you to imagine someone elsewhere.
The essentials
Watch for the imaginary editor in your head. Training based on imported manuals and international media can encourage a reporter to explain familiar local realities to an imagined foreign audience, while overlooking what local readers actually want to understand. Recognition abroad should not replace service to the people you cover.
Examine what you explain and what you assume. Defining an everyday local dish for local readers suggests the wrong imagined audience. Using an institutional abbreviation without explanation can exclude everyone outside the specialist circle. Both choices reveal who you think is reading, whether or not that choice is deliberate.
Build the story around the real public. What consequences matter to them? Which term needs a definition, and which familiar detail needs none? A specific reader is more useful than an abstract audience assumed to know either everything or nothing. International attention may follow good work, but it should remain a possible result rather than the organising purpose of the article.
Take it to the field
Imagine a real person who will read the story. What do they already know, which term needs explaining and what concrete consequence matters to them? Answering those questions will guide both the reporting and the writing.
Your turn
Revisit your latest article. Mark everything you explained and everything you assumed readers knew. Who was your imaginary reader? Compare that person with the audience you actually serve.