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Journal of Business Communication, Vol. 44, No. 1, 59-95 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0021943606295780

How Promotional Language in Press Releases Is Dealt With by Journalists: Genre Mixing or Genre Conflict?

Henk Pander Maat

Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, h.pan-dermaat{at}let.uu.nl

This study investigates how promotional language in corporate press releases is dealt with when the release is reused in different journalistic genres. Using a new coding system, it analyzes 89 press releases and their journalistic transformations. Promotional language is shown to be a regular feature of corporate press releases, especially those presenting new products or services. The first press release corpus consisted of releases issued by companies in the airline industry, and the second corpus contained press releases of various large companies operating in the Netherlands. The press releases in the first corpus were generally used in special interest media such as magazines on air travel; these media largely preserved the promotional tone of the press releases, thus exemplifying the tendency of "promotionalization." The press releases in the second corpus were used in economics sections of daily papers; these news reports conformed to a more "hard news" register because they did not include most of the promotional elements from press release material.

Key Words: news reports • press releases • genre analysis • genre conflict • news editing • communicative purposes • promotion • style • intensifiers • corpus analysis


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