Although individuals encounter health advice in many different media, magazines are an especially fruitful source for health information because of their interpretive, dialogic, and personal-service function. Yet, existing scholarship that addresses media health content largely overlooks the perspectives of magazine journalists who produce health content. This dissertation aims to bridge that gap with its investigation of the production of consumer-magazine health articles. In doing so, it contributes to the research on news values, objectivity, magazine production, mediated health communication, and perceptions of audience behavior. It explores the ideas and practices that magazine editors and writers use to construct health articles that they believe will resonate with readers. In particular, it evaluates the frames journalists select to make sense out of complex medical information, and how editorial methods serve to routinize this practice. This dissertation also examines how the journalists envision their audience and how this perception of the reader influences story construction. Lastly, this research investigates how the journalists configure their role in the information-seeking habits of readers and what it means journalistically to diminish the boundary between journalists and audiences.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 22 writers, editors, and researchers about their experiences and perspectives in producing magazine health content, and their answers were analyzed within a multi-faceted theoretical framework. To elucidate the words of these journalists, this dissertation draws on frame analysis, media dependency theory, the play theory of mass communication and the hierarchy-of-effects principle. Rather than attempting to understand audience behavior, this study instead uses audience frameworks to conceptualize the relationship between journalists and audiences from the journalists' point of view. This study finds that the magazine journalists interviewed treat "truth" as a news value, rather than presupposing its existence through their routines. In addition, they focus on "actionable" health information, which cultivates personal-responsibility frames. Furthermore, these magazine journalists reveal themselves to have more sophisticated ideas of audience effects, a finding which might confound some aspects of existing media criticism. Ultimately, their position that knowing and being responsible for the audience is acceptable behavior has ramifications for journalism scholarship and practice.