How do magazines make science accessible and appealing to a broad readership? To answer this question, we studied an article which was published in Le Figaro magazine, the weekly magazine supplement of a large French daily newspaper. The article, which presents information on cancer and immunology, is illustrated with three large and spectacular colour photographs of microscopic corpuscles. A semio-linguistic and communications analysis revealed that a general series of elements, made up of headlines, photos and captions, forms a kind of narrative that can be read like a short melodrama. The text of the interview with the researcher proposes reformulations, directed to conscientious readers who take the trouble to understand the specialized terms. Finally, in the infratext, experts and specialists are able to discern references and allusions to different sorts of issues at play. In short, we show how an article can simultaneously attract different categories of readers.
