City magazines have a powerful role in convincing readers to take proactive health measures, however they rarely take advantage of their capacity to set their communities' public agendas. This study considered the health content in five city magazines in Texas: Austin Monthly, D Magazine, Fort Worth, Texas Magazine, Houstonia, and San Antonio Magazine. Using agenda building, agenda-setting, and second-level agenda-setting, this research quantitatively analyzed 169 health articles published in 2018 on the five magazines' websites for how the publications presented health news. The core findings of this research included: the overall agenda was actionable health, the city magazines were more than three times more likely to cite an indirect source than a human, and that salient story elements promoted the historical status quo of city magazines and not the health agenda or health literacy. The most prevalent story topic was nutrition/fitness, occurring in the majority of the articles. The core of my research was to question whether these publications were publishing health content that reflected their cities' health profiles. While some magazines, such as Houstonia and Fort Worth, Texas Magazine did better than others, all of the city magazines could improve.by Catherine WendlandtIncludes bibliographical reference
