But infotainment still comes nowhere near dominating the traditional news package. There is an even more pervasive shift toward featurized and people-oriented approach to the news, away from traditional straight news accounts. This tends to make the news more thematic and make the journalist more a story teller and mediator than a reporter. The news media are dividing into market-based niches, with a result that a citizen's perception of society can vary greatly depending on the source of news. News magazines which once concentrated heavily on coverage of ideas have moved heavily toward celebrity.
Newspapers continue to cover government, foreign policy and domestic policy as a staple.
The network news has become a hybrid of all the others. Moreover, if one expands the definition of news media to include the universe of everything on television or the news rack, celebrity, entertainment and scandal have become a much larger percentage of what audiences get. Consider the proliferation of such programs as Entertainment Tonight, Extra, Access Hollywood or the pseudo news programs like Inside Edition or Hard Copy, as well as the expanding universe of prime time network news magazines that have replaced documentaries on network television. While content studies have their limits, and the question of what is entertainment and what is news is open to interpretation, the data clearly indicates that there have been major shifts in how the news media define the news. We are not attempting to make definitive judgments about whether these trends are necessarily positive or negative.