Editing Infotainment (section)

==Background==
The terms "infotainment" and "infotainer" were first used in September 1980 at the Joint Conference of [[Association for Information Management|ASLIB]], the [[Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals|Institute of Information Scientists]], and the [[Library Association]] in [[Sheffield]], UK.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kwanya |first1=Tom |last2=Stilwell |first2=Christine |last3=Underwood |first3=Peter G. |title=Library 3.0 - Intelligent Libraries and Apomediation |date=2015 |publisher=Chandos Publishing |isbn=978-1-84334-718-7 |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9781843347187/library-3-0 |access-date=15 December 2023}}</ref> The Infotainers were a group of British information scientists who put on comedy shows at these professional conferences between 1980 and 1990.{{Citation needed|date=October 2017}}  In 1983, "infotainment" began to see more popular usage,<ref name="dictionary.com" /> and the infotainment style gradually began to replace soft news with [[Communication theory|communications theorists]].<ref name="britannica.com">{{cite web|title=infotainment - television program|url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/infotainment}}</ref>

An earlier, slightly variant term, "{{not a typo|infortainment}}" was the theme of the 1974 convention of the [[Intercollegiate Broadcasting System]], the association of college radio stations in the United States. The event held April 5–7, 1974, at the Statler Hilton Hotel (now the [[Hotel Pennsylvania]]), defined the term as the "nexus between Information and Entertainment".{{Citation needed|date=October 2017}}

Historically, the term infotainment was used to discredit woman journalists who were assigned soft news jobs. Soft news was expected to be consumed only by women,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Barker-Benfield|first=G. J.|url=https://archive.org/details/portraitsofameri00gjba_0|title=Portraits of American Women: From Settlement to the Present|date=16 October 1998|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=9780195120486|page=[https://archive.org/details/portraitsofameri00gjba_0/page/534 534]|quote=infotainment women journalists-Car. -cars.|url-access=registration|via=Internet Archive}}</ref> but eventually it became its own genre of news media.<ref name="thecut.com">{{cite web|title=How Barbara Walters Invented the Internet|date=16 May 2013 |url=https://www.thecut.com/2013/05/how-barbara-walters-invented-the-internet.html}}</ref>