Pragmatics - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2008

Press releases are short pieces of writing issued by companies or institutions to communicate newsworthy information to the journalist community on the one hand, and to the general public (indirectly through newspaper reporting, or, increasingly, directly by making press releases available on corporate websites) on the other. While ostensibly informative, press releases also carry an implicitly self-promotional purpose, in so far as the information they contain comes from a source internal to the organization which is the object of the release itself. This paper explores the generic features of press releases and investigates the way in which they codify the different communicative purposes and multiple receiver roles which distinguish the genre. Drawing on Bhatia’s work on genre (Bhatia 1993, 2004), and building on Jacobs’s preformulating features (Jacobs 1999a), which can be seen as linguistic strategies aimed at achieving the primary and most ostensible purpose of the press release (i.e. getting the story in the news with as little manipulation as possible on the part of journalists), the paper identifies a set of moves and strategies common to the genre, and links them to communicative purposes on the one hand, and to envisioned audiences on the other. It is argued that the press release occupies a hybrid position along the informative-promotional continuum, and that identification of its communicative purpose relies as much on core as on peripheral textual features.

This contribution is concerned with press releases from the European Commission and national ministries. Political press releases may serve other purposes than those issued by business organisations, and they are also a fairly unexplored field in press release research, which this study sets out to remedy. The linguistic dimension of EU communication is also a neglected field of study, and this paper is aimed at introducing the linguistic dimension of the European Commission communication as a field of study worthy of closer examination. Within a genre-based analytical framework, the present paper aims at examining to what extent we can identify a unique community text pattern in European Commission press releases. I propose a macrostructural text analysis in which I compare a number of press releases issued by the European Commission with national equivalents from French and Swedish ministries. In particular, I will focus on three recurrent and characteristic text features of the European Commission press release, viz. the introduction, the quotation and the intertextual references. It is shown that the way they are designed in the European Commission press release is quite special and that this can be explained with reference to the communicative situation of the European Commission. In doing so, I will be drawing on ethnographic data that I gathered from fieldwork at the European Commission.<<

This paper considers notions of agency, interaction and power in business news journalism. In the first part, we present a bird’s eye view of news access theory as it is reflected in selected sociological and anthropological literature on the ethnography of news production. Next, we show how these theoretical notions can be applied to the study of press releases and particularly to the linguistic pragmatic analysis of the specific social and textual practices that surround their transformation into news reports. Drawing on selected fieldwork data collected at the business desk of a major Flemish quality newspaper, we present an innovative methodology combining newsroom ethnography and computer-assisted writing process analysis which documents how a reporter discovers a story, introduces it into the newsroom, writes and reflects on it. In doing so, we put the individual journalist’s writing practices center stage, zoom in on the specific ways in which he interacts with sources and conceptualize power in terms of his dependence on press releases. Following Beeman & Peterson (2001), we argue in favor of a view of journalism as ‘interpretive practice’ and of news production as a process of entextualization involving multiple actors who struggle over authority, ownership and control.

Although corporate press releases are ‘preformulated’ to fit some of the conventions of journalistic reports, their style at times seems quite different from the one favoured by journalists. That is, there appear to exist stylistic conflicts between the press release genre and the press report genre. This study investigates the nature of these conflicts by means of a corpus analysis of the reworking strategies employed by journalists that actually use press releases to compose press reports. Roughly, two orientations can be discerned behind the journalistic transformations of release copy: Readability and neutrality. In order to improve readability, journalists create shorter and less complex sentences, use everyday words, replace numbers and symbols by words, and insert short bits of background information. In order to preserve neutrality, they remove company and product names, tone down or remove positive statements, and introduce the company as source for statements they do not want to be responsible for. Some transformations are more complex in that they are carried out in both directions: For instance, the company name may be removed as the subject in a press report sentence, but in other cases it may be introduced in the press report. These two-way operations are shown to be sensitive to different orientations at the same time. For instance, removing company names from the subject position may help preserve neutrality, while introducing it may personalize the text and hence improve readability. In the discussion, the genre conflict between press releases and press reports is analyzed in terms of the incompatibility of the stylistic constraints both genres need to satisfy. Some of the incompatibilities derive from differences in the communicative purposes characteristic of the two genres, while others probably have to do with the specific organizational context that co-determines the style of press releases.

It is the desk editor’s task to revise the press releases presented to the newspaper in order to get news stories that are fit to print. What does that mean: Revise? This question is answered by a corpus study of appositions in press releases and the news stories that are based on them. The analysis is carried out in two directions. In the ‘forward’ analysis, the question is how appositions in source texts are dealt with by desk editors. In the ‘backward’ analysis, the origins are traced in the news stories. It is shown that appositions are revised quite often. From the revision data we may infer a number of motives for editorial interventions. Newspaper editors are more inclined than writers of press releases to favor concise sentences with a smooth, uninterrupted intonation contour and with a neutral outsider’s perspective.