By applying Kenneth Burke's concepts of Order, the Secret, and the Kill to the newspaper-audience-advertiser relationship, the narrow imagery that depicts that relationship only in economic terms can be counteracted. Burke's maps of hierarchy, mystery, and transcendence in human action allow the depiction of a complex meshing of patterns, increasing our understanding and appreciation of the news marketplace. Newspapers can be seen as the perfecting of The System and various subsystems in which the news and reader identify, such as national, state, and local systems or the economic and ecological systems. The mounting of hierarchies and the phasing from unknowns to knowns in the mystery process are forms of transcendence. Victimage and the cult of the Kill are keys for understanding transcendence as "rising above." Newspapers provide the reader with a fresh sense of transcendence through self-comparison with the negatives and evils of society, and thus serve a redemptive function. In a culture fixated with quantities, the newspaper can be seen as a "perfection measurement" report. The perfecting of athletics, for example, draws a heavy readership, mostly due to the rhetorical appeal of the "climb to the top" in each sporting hierarchy--the "mounting impulse" in which the readers can vicariously participate. The newspapers court readers with secrets to be made sense of ("Who will win the contest?""Why did the killer do it?"), establishing the realm of questions--the mystery--to which they will provide the answers. Burke's concepts are "shorthand terms" for how people mesh their patterns of experience, explanations for why and how people join in communicative structures. (Fifteen references are appended.) (NKA)