Data from four separate studies in three developing nations that received magazines published by the International Communication Agency (formerly the United States Information Agency) were used to discover how important image is as a determinant of readership and to identify the relative importance of each image attribute. Respondents in each of the samples were administered the same set of 11 bipolar adjective scales. Evaluations of the first magazine, "Horizons," were gathered in Venezuela and in the Philippines, which allowed for the assessment of cross-cultural patterns in the evaluations. Evaluations of the second and third magazines, "Topic" and "Interlink," were obtained from two matched samples in Nigeria, allowing cross-magazine comparisons within a single country. A discriminant analysis using the 11 evaluation scales as the discriminating variables was carried out for each of the four data sets to identify the linear combination of the evaluation scales that would maximally discriminate between regular and occasional readers. A large number of attributes did not discriminate between regular and occasional readers in any of the studies. Only three attributes--impartiality, accuracy, and visual attractiveness--were present in at least three of the four derived functions. Although statistically significant, these functions were able to improve prediction of readership only 14% to 17% above chance in a classification analysis. (Author/FL)