<P> The terms "infotainment" and "infotainer" were first used in September 1980 at the Joint Conference of Aslib, the Institute of Information Scientists and the Library Association in Sheffield, UK . The Infotainers were a group of British information scientists who put on comedy shows at their professional conferences between 1980 and 1990 . In 1983, infotainment began to see more popular usage Around this time, infotainment gradually began to replace soft news with communications theorists . </P> <P> An earlier, and slightly variant term, "infortainment" was coined in 1974 as the title of the 1974 convention of the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS), the association of college radio stations in the United States . It took place on April 5--7, 1974, at the Statler Hilton Hotel, now the Hotel Pennsylvania . It was defined as the "nexus between Information and Entertainment". </P>

When did television news became a branch of infotainment