ABSTRACT Academic interest in what has been termed “infotainment” has grown considerably since the term was coined in the 1980s. Today, the burgeoning field of infotainment research has become an important interdisciplinary field of study producing numerous political, cultural, and social insights. Nevertheless, infotainment remains highly contested, multifaceted, and incoherent, both as a term and a field of study. Preliminary attempts have been made to give greater conceptual clarity and standardization to the term, although their success has been limited, leaving difficulties in analyzing and comparing findings in a unified manner. In this review essay I outline the findings from a comprehensive literature review by delineating three mains trajectories of infotainment research: (1) research on soft news programming; (2) research on traditional news media; and (3) research on media systems and global infotainment. To conclude, I offer three suggestions for future infotainment research, arguing that scholars should attempt to achieve standardization and conceptual clarity within, rather than across research trajectories, that political theory should be more explicitly incorporated into the literature for the purposes of standardizing methods and clarifying normative debates, and that research should also focus on the synergies between contemporary trends in political campaign/communications strategies and trends in infotainment.

中文翻译：

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绘制信息娱乐文献：当前的轨迹和对未来研究的建议

摘要 自从 1980 年代这个术语被创造以来，学术界对“信息娱乐”的兴趣已经大大增加。今天，新兴的信息娱乐研究领域已经成为一个重要的跨学科研究领域，产生了大量的政治、文化和社会见解。尽管如此，信息娱乐作为一个术语和一个研究领域，仍然存在高度争议、多面性和不连贯性。已经初步尝试为该术语提供更大的概念清晰度和标准化，尽管它们的成功有限，导致难以以统一的方式分析和比较发现。在这篇评论文章中，我通过描绘信息娱乐研究的三个主要轨迹来概述综合文献综述的发现：（1）软新闻节目的研究；（二）传统新闻媒体研究；(3) 媒体系统和全球信息娱乐研究。最后，我对未来的信息娱乐研究提出三点建议，认为学者应该尝试在研究轨迹内而不是跨研究轨迹实现标准化和概念清晰，政治理论应该更明确地纳入文献中，以便标准化方法和澄清规范性辩论，并且该研究还应关注政治运动/传播策略的当代趋势与信息娱乐趋势之间的协同作用。