Press releases

Geert's book-length study of 1999 was one of the first linguistic analyses of press releases. His study showed that in order to facilitate the reproduction process referred to above, press releases are prefabricated in an appropriate news style. The typical so-called 'preformulating' features include the use of powerful, newspaper-like headlines, followed by a comprehensive 'lead' paragraph and boilerplate as well as a number of special metapragmatic features, most prominently third-person self-reference and (pseudo-)quotation.

The concept of preformulation in press releases has been and continues to be subjected to further empirical study. Lenaerts (2002), in trying to find out to what extent press releases find their way into the media, compares six political press releases on a language policy-related crisis in Belgium with the newspaper articles that report on it. Pander Maat (2005) compares 50 press releases issued by industrial companies with the newspaper reports based on them and proposes a number of maxims to show how journalists routinely transform releases according to regular patterns.

Kim Sleurs' research, combining an ethnography of the PR business with the writing process analysis of cognitive psychology, takes into account the full dynamics of the news production process within its institutionalized media and PR setting. Both Sleurs, Jacobs & Van Waes (2003) and Sleurs & Jacobs (2005) examine the extent to which preformulation concerns determine how press officers write up their press releases. Similarly, Strobbe & Jacobs (2005) have examined how the introduction of electronic press releases influences the writing and rewriting routines of news agencies' editorial staff. Finally, Tom's ongoing research looks at how business journalists incorporate press releases into their news articles. He combines linguistic ethnography with computer-assisted writing process analysis through Inputlog keylogging software.