Help wanted: What, exactly, is "entertainment"??

What does it mean to be entertaining?  I realized last weekend that I don't really know. (Insert joke about clueless quants here.)  I mean, I know "entertaining" when I see it, but defining it in a way that's measurable is tough.

For example, I imagine that most people would agree that the Onion is usually more entertaining than C-SPAN.  But why?  What is it about the content that's different?

Here are a few more examples.  I imagine most people will agree with me on the Daily Show, Onion, and all the things in the less entertaining column. To my mind, on a scale from "not entertaining at all" to "very entertaining," Gawker, Fox News and MSNBC seem less entertaining than John Stuart, but a lot more entertaining than the New York Times.  That is, they're trying harder to grab and hold onto viewers' attention.  The use a lot of the same gimmicks.

More entertaining		Less entertaining
The Daily Show Gawker The Onion MSNBC (?) Fox News (?)		NYT WSJ WaPo CSPAN Foreign policy

All this matters because I'm trying to measure the difference between entertaining and non-entertaining content in political blogs.  For this kind of research, it's not enough to say "Blog X seems more entertaining to me than blog Y."  I need to measure entertainment, and show that other people can replicate my measurement (After all, repeated measurement is the starting point for all science.)

To get there, I've been trying to write a "codebook" (like a survey, but about text instead of opinions) to measure entertainment in blog posts and news coverage.  Here's what I've got so far.

Can you think of things to add?  I'd really appreciate your ideas and suggestions...

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How well do these statements describe this article: very well, somewhat well, a little well, or not at all well?

	Not at all	A little	Somewhat	Very
This article is written to be entertaining.
This article is written in a serious tone.
This article includes jokes and/or other humor.
The tone of this article is sarcastic and/or ironic.
This article includes sexual references, imagery, or innuendo.
The writing in this article is engaging---it gets and holds the reader's attention.
The writing in this article is flat---it doesn't do much to hold the reader's attention.

Pain points on Pulse newsreader

Pulse newsreader came preinstalled on the kindle fire I got for Christmas (thanks, Sam!).  On the whole I like it, but a few glaring bugs and omissions really hold it back.

• Bug: after pressing the star button on one post, it gets stuck for all the other posts on the blog.  AFAICT, you can only star one post per blog per session.  Clunky.

• Bug: when I'm offline---I do a lot of my blog reading on the bus---Pulse doesn't seem to remember which blog posts I've read.  I read it, swipe it, and then next time I'm on the grid it seems to pop right back up.  I can't tell if it's doing this all the time or just a lot of the time, but it's a pain to hit the same articles two, three times, and up.

• Feature request: I love being able to post to twitter with two clicks.  (This is nice for Pulse too, because they get their name in the link.)  Can you let me queue tweets in offline mode, then sync with twitter once I get back on the grid?

• Feature request: alternatively, can you provide an API to starred items?  If I could get at those (say as RSS), I could automate the posting to twitter myself.

Pulse, are you listening?  Fix these and I will be your friend forever.  Until then, I'm looking suggestions on blog readers...