The Era of Infotainment

When news meet entertainment.

I was waiting for my subway, the other day, on the Konstablerwache station in Frankfurt am Main. While I was listening to music, I realized that there is a screen right in front of me, showing different ads and also current news. Even though I see the so called Infoscreen everyday, I never observed it consciously. I was interested in finding out more about it, so I visited their website. Infoscreen stands for “entertainment and advertisement on the platform” and the website states that “infotainment is an attention grabber”.

That keyword stayed in my head for the whole week. I started realizing how many different news sources there are — newspapers, websites etc.. And when there is a growing supply, there also is a rising competition. That probably might be one of the reasons for growing infotainment media.

I started looking for other infotainment media and found the Facebook page and website of AJ+. AJ+ presents itself as a

global news community for the connected generation. We highlight human struggles and achievements, empower impassioned voices and challenge the status quo. We bring you the stories that are shaping our world. Do you ever laugh, cry, get angry or inspired? You’ll fit right in.

The Facebook page was started in October 2013 and has already 7,5+ million likes and counting. They also run a Youtube page where they present videos of current events and opinions of people.

The Facebook page has become very popular and the posts reach more than 500k people in a few hours.

The AJ+ videos on Facebook do not feature any reporter reporting about the incidents. They work with subtitles so that people can also watch the videos on mute, while scrolling down their Faccebook feed. The viewer is guided by short texts and informations about the incidents and there is mostly some kind of dramatic music playing in the backgrround. They try to cover many opinions of real people involved in the incidents or even the twitter community. On this way they connect entertainment features with real news in order to make it more fun to watch the news, even though most of the stories they cover are not fun at all (see above).

We live in a time where people want to be moved, entertained while getting information. News media has to be innovative and fun in order to attract more people. Media like AJ+ make a huge contribution to the infotainment movement. They have become so big, that they are even hiring now.

Edit: when I posted the post today (10 hours ago) the video above had about 500k views, now it’s more than a million, which shows the range and the power of infotainment media like that.