diff --git a/R/footnote.R b/R/footnote.R
index daecbd9..a7e2aa2 100644
--- a/R/footnote.R
+++ b/R/footnote.R
@@ -30,6 +30,7 @@
 #' @param alphabet_title Section header for alphabet footnotes. Default is "".
 #' @param symbol_title Section header for symbol footnotes. Default is "".
 #'
+#'
 #' @examples dt <- mtcars[1:5, 1:5]
 #' footnote(knitr::kable(dt, "html"), alphabet = c("Note a", "Note b"))
 #'
@@ -175,7 +176,7 @@
     paste0('<sup>', x[1], '</sup> ', x[2])
   })
   if (ft_title != "") {
-    title_text <- paste0('<strong>', ft_title, '</strong>')
+    title_text <- paste0('<em>', ft_title, '</em>')
     footnote_text <- c(title_text, footnote_text)
   }
   if (!ft_chunk) {
@@ -284,7 +285,7 @@
     }
   })
   if (ft_title != "") {
-    title_text <- paste0('\\\\textbf{', ft_title, '} ')
+    title_text <- paste0('\\\\textit{', ft_title, '} ')
     footnote_text <- c(title_text, footnote_text)
   }
   if (!ft_chunk) {
@@ -310,7 +311,7 @@
     }
   })
   if (ft_title != "") {
-    title_text <- paste0('\\\\item \\\\textbf{', ft_title, '} ')
+    title_text <- paste0('\\\\item \\\\textit{', ft_title, '} ')
     footnote_text <- c(title_text, footnote_text)
   }
   footnote_text <- paste0(footnote_text, collapse = "\n")
diff --git a/inst/NEWS.md b/inst/NEWS.md
index 66fe15a..86efc2c 100644
--- a/inst/NEWS.md
+++ b/inst/NEWS.md
@@ -19,6 +19,8 @@
 
 * Added an auto_index function to facilitate group_rows. (#193) 
 
+* Changed footnote title format from bold to italic. (#200)
+
 kableExtra 0.8.0
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * Now kableExtra imports & exports knitr::kable so users don't need to load knitr entirely to NAMESPACE when it's not necessary, for example, in shiny.