Magazine Features and Infotainment Values

Abstract

The determinants which privilege selection of articles for mass market women's magazines have been little investigated. Conventionally, the articles are seen to convey information didactically in the service sections and entertain through the feature stories. Many feature stories combine information and human interest to produce a hybrid form of article. This paper appropriates the term ‘infotainment’ to describe them. It draws on health articles to develop an argument about infotainment values as they operate in mass market Australian magazines, identifying nine determining characteristics and suggesting that they can be found more widely.