Genres and Processes in the PR Industry

Abstract

This article examines the processes involved in the production and pitching of press releases and considers the demands that these make on PR practitioners, particularly newcomers to the industry. The study tracks the course of events as a PR company undertook a promotional brief, using as its central source of data a daily journal written by an intern who was closely involved in the process. Three pivotal cycles of activity, each constructed by means of a cluster of satellite genres and activities, contributed to the overall process: brainstorming, writing the press release itself, and media-pitching. The findings show the ways in which the goals of the PR organization under study were achieved by means of a complex, dynamic, collaboratively constructed, and intertextually linked genre system. It is suggested that becoming a successful PR practitioner involves learning how to manage an interconnected process that is constantly evolving, and how to rework and repackage information for different audiences.

Keywords

press release genre systems intertextuality workplace writing processes collaboration

Introduction

The notion that workplace writing is a complex, recursive, intertextual, and collaborative process is widely accepted: It has been demonstrated in numerous studies in different fields and workplaces, ranging from engineering (Winsor, 2003) to banking (Smart, 2006). Yet every discipline and profession has its own way of constructing knowledge, drawing upon different genre configurations, and employing different patterns of interaction to achieve its particular goals. This article looks at writing practices in the PR industry, a relatively underresearched area whose textual practices, particularly relating to the construction of press releases, are characterized by what Jacobs (2006) refers to as a special “participation framework” (p. 200). Specifically the article looks at the processes involved in the construction and pitching of press releases, and considers the demands that these processes make on practitioners, particularly newcomers to the PR industry. The central role that the press release plays in the activities of the public relations industry, along with its complexity as a text type, makes it an object of considerable potential interest to researchers of writing practices in that industry. Since Jacobs’s (1999) groundbreaking study of the ways in which these texts are preformulated, a small but growing number of studies has appeared investigating the nature of press releases and the processes surrounding their construction.

The complexity of the press release rests in the different communicative purposes and multiple receiver roles that are associated with it as a text type (Catenaccio, 2008). The fact that a press release is intended to meet several communicative goals is discussed by Lindholm (2008), who cites Jacobs in this regard: “press releases are meant for different audiences and, naturally, they are also supposed to do different things to them” (1999, p. 22). Indeed, the multipurpose nature of the press release has led to considerable discussion as to its exact nature—whether it is a hybrid genre (Catenaccio, 2008; McLaren & Gurău, 2005) or a media channel (Lassen, 2006). As for the issue of multiple readers, this is addressed by Jacobs: Drawing together research in the area, he contends that the genre of the press release is characterized by a special “participation framework,” as noted above, whereby the target audience is a “more general reading public” as well as journalists, resulting in “a kind of indirectly targeted, projected discourse” (2006, p. 200).

Thus the press release, with its different purposes and audiences, presents particular challenges for PR practitioners, warranting research studies that investigate the processes involved in the writing of press releases and also that consider the demands made on participants in these processes. Much research has focused on the texts and their generic features (e.g., McLaren & Gurău, 2005; Tench, 2003), in some cases alongside the contributing contextual factors (e.g., Catenaccio, 2008; Lindholm, 2008). Other studies have considered specific aspects of press releases: Jacobs (1999), as mentioned earlier, looked at the issue of preformulation, a practice he explains in a later article whereby the language of press releases is worked into “a news style that requires little or no reworking on the part of the journalists who receive them” (Jacobs, 2006, p. 201). Another point of focus is the use of pseudo-quotes (Sleurs, Jacobs, & Van Waes, 2003), the construction of direct speech that is attributed to a participant in the reported process, where the words are “almost certainly not verbalised by the named source” (Bell, 1991, p. 60). Other aspects of press releases that have been examined include the intertextual nature of the process by which they are constructed (Pander Maat, 2008; Sleurs et al., 2003), the influence of the Internet on the way in which they are formulated (Strobbe & Jacobs, 2005), and how promotional language is dealt with when the releases are reused by journalists (Pander Maat, 2007, 2008).

As can be seen, the focus in these studies is largely on the textual product. Catenaccio (2008) argues that beyond this there is the need to understand the stages involved in writing a press release, “as well as (of) the type of contribution provided by the multiple participants involved to a greater or lesser degree in press release production and reception” (p. 14), yet, as Sleurs and Jacobs (2005) explain, the bulk of research into news production has been concerned with the press release itself, rather than the associated production processes.

Certain more recent studies, however, have turned their attention to the processes involved in writing press releases. Sleurs et al. (2003) explain what they call the “life-cycle” of a press release: the client briefing, the process of writing the release, sending it out to the media, the relationship with the journalist, and how it appears in the media; those studies that have attended to the process of press release production have focused on different stages of this life cycle. In their research, Sleurs et al. investigated the construction of pseudo-quotations and the role they have to play in terms of preformulation. Their case study focused on the activities and insights of a professional writer in a small PR agency, and they employed a multidimensional methodology, combining ethnographic fieldwork with methods associated with cognitive psychology, including think-aloud protocols and the online recording of the writing process. Their conclusions suggest that “preformulation plays a double role” (2003, p. 209) in that the writer is trying to anticipate what the journalists will do with his work and to satisfy the expectations of his client.

Sleurs and Jacobs (2005), looking at the processes connected with preformulation, used a similar set of data collection methods as they aimed for a “close, micro-level reconstruction, analysis, and interpretation of PR routines” (p. 1256). In this case, they focused on a very specific element of a press release, namely, the use of the second-person, which they say is “typically avoided in press releases” (p. 1258) and therefore a point of interest for them as researchers. What emerges from their study, this highly specific focus notwithstanding, is the sense that the gradual shaping of the press release as it goes through different drafts is a reflection of the need on the writer’s part to accommodate different positions and concerns.

Other studies have been concerned with later stages in the life cycle of the press release. Pander Maat, working with corpora of press releases, looks at how promotional language is dealt with by journalists (2007) and at the transformations made in the newsroom in the light of the issue of potential genre conflict (2008). Finally, Van Hout and Jacobs (2008), combining ethnography with computer-assisted writing process analysis, conducted a study with a focus on an individual journalist’s activities as he worked on the transformation of press releases into news reports.

There is, then, a growing body of research into press releases, providing insights into both their generic structure and other features, and the ways in which practitioners go about writing them. However, as explained above, the few studies that have concerned themselves with the processes of writing press releases have either focused on very specific aspects of the process, or have looked at activity in the newsroom.

This study follows the course of events as a PR company undertook a promotional brief for a client. It differs from previous research in two respects: firstly, it adopts a broader perspective, examining not just the role and construction of the press release itself, but also the processes leading up to the writing of the press release and the activities involved in pitching the story to the media. Taking the position, alluded to in the introduction, that writing is a complex, recursive, intertextual, and collaborative process, the study seeks to examine how these elements of workplace writing activity play out in a PR setting, looking specifically at the ways in which genres come together to achieve particular goals, the ways in which they are linked intertextually, and the collaborative patterns of interaction that are seen during the process.

The second noteworthy aspect of the study relates to the way in which the data were gathered, namely by means of a day-by-day account of the various activities undertaken by the PR agency, written by an intern who participated in these. Not only does this account afford a detailed set of “behind-the-scenes” insights into the process of writing and promoting press releases, but, very importantly, it also provides an understanding of the demands involved from the perspective of someone who is learning how to become a PR practitioner.

Specifically the study considers the following questions:

What processes and activities are involved in the construction and promotion of a press release?

What demands do these activities make on participants, particularly newcomers?

Methodological Background

The goal of taking a broad perspective on the activities surrounding the construction and promotion of press releases necessitates a theoretical framework that goes beyond the analysis of individual genres. This section considers three aspects of workplace writing, namely the notion that genres are embedded in larger systems of textual activity, that they are linked intertextually, and that the process of creating texts is a highly collaborative one; it then goes on to outline the methodology employed to capture these elements of the writing process.

As Zachry (2000b) explains, genres exist “as part of larger networks of activities that help organizations realize objectives” (p. 61). A number of researchers have taken this perspective on workplace communication: Devitt (1991), for example, explains the idea of “genre sets,” the groups of text-genres that practitioners in a given profession create as they go about their daily tasks, while Bazerman (1994) proposes the concept of “systems of genres,” which “would be the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all the parties” (p. 99), and Bhatia (2004) talks of “a set of domain-specific disciplinary genres,” using examples from the legal profession to illustrate this idea. Meanwhile Swales (2004), looking at different types of genre configuration, uses the term “genre chain,” whereby genres are seen as part of a straightforward chronological process, with distinct stages following one another, and “genre systems,” which are collections of intertextually related genres. In the context of research into press release writing, an instance of the former is seen in Pander Maat (2008), who talks about press releases and news reports—the object of his study—as constituting a “genre chain.”

Viewing genres as interrelated clusters operating in a particular workplace context is a useful way of understanding activity in that context. Orlikowski and Yates (1994) invoke what they call “genre repertoires” as an investigative tool: “to understand a community’s practices, we must examine the set of genres that are routinely enacted by the community” (p. 542); Zachry (2000a), meanwhile, talks of the need “to begin accounting for the interplay of multiple communicative practices in the professional settings we study” (p. 100). Berkenkotter (2001) articulates her position on this very clearly, saying that “the professions are organized by genre systems and their work is carried out through genre systems” (p. 327, emphasis in original) and it is through the study of these that we can understand more about the practices of professional writers.

As can be seen, there is a proliferation of terms to describe the ways in which genres group and interconnect to achieve particular goals. For the purpose of this article, the term genre system is used, along with Bazerman’s (1994) explanation that such systems consist of “interdependent genres that are enacted in some typical sequence . . . in relation to each other, and whose purpose and form interlock” (Yates and Orlikowski, 2002, p. 15).

An important feature of these genre systems is that the genres within them are linked intertextually. Reither (1993) contends that workplace writing in general “is ‘social,’ ‘collaborative,’ ‘intertextual’ in that authors challenge, modify, use, build on, and add to the utterances of others to join in ‘co-operative competition’ with them in the process of text and knowledge-making” (p. 198); intertextuality is widely reported as a workplace phenomenon in a range of studies such as Louhiala-Salminen (2002), Devitt (1991, 2004), Flowerdew and Wan (2006), and Bremner (2008). Gunnarsson (1997) also talks about the “continuous interplay” between spoken and written discourse in the workplace, as does Smart (2006). Both Berkenkotter (2001) and Bhatia (2004) consider intertextuality to be a useful analytical tool for genre analysis; indeed, Berkenkotter, bringing us back to the concept of “genre system,” claims that “one of the central means for identifying texts in a genre system is their intertextual activity” (2001, p. 330, emphasis in original).

The third element of the writing process that needs accounting for is its collaborative nature. Burnett (2001) suggests that a high proportion of workplace writing (as much as 75% to 85%) is collaborative; studies of this phenomenon have proliferated since the early work of Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller (1985) and Couture and Rymer (1989), ranging from work focused on categorizing patterns of interaction (e.g., Ede & Lunsford, 1990; Lowry, Curtis, & Lowry, 2004) to ethnographic studies of large-scale collaboration in specific workplaces (e.g., Cross, 1994, 2001). Essentially this is a central feature of the writing process, and the aim in this study is to identify the “participatory mechanisms” (Bhatia, 2004) that obtain in a PR organization.

As intimated above, a research methodology was needed that would capture the various elements, identified in the preceding paragraphs, of the processes surrounding the production of press releases. One approach that affords the kind of close access to a site that would help fulfil this goal is that of interpretive ethnography, which Smart (1998) champions as “a methodology for studying the ways in which a social group constructs and lives its particular, indigenous version of reality,” arguing that this is a useful way to look into “how members of a professional community go about producing and applying specialized written knowledge” (p. 111).

The methodology in this study is centered around interpretive ethnography, but with a slight difference, in that a research assistant was placed as an intern into a PR company for a 3-month period. In her position as both employee and researcher, she was thus able to gain sustained access to the community, and produced a very full account of activity there; it is her account of events in the organization that forms the basis of this study. The way that this aspect of the methodological approach was handled is discussed in the next section.

The Study

The study took place in a small PR company in Hong Kong, referred to in this article as HKPR. The company consisted of five employees, one of whom was the intern mentioned above, Sammi, placed in the organization for a 3-month period as part of a research project investigating practices in the Hong Kong PR industry, specifically the role of collaboration and creativity. During her internship, Sammi wrote a daily reflective journal, in which she was asked to focus on those two elements; what emerged was a very full account of the organization’s activities and her own experiences over this period, which served as the central source of data.

Sammi’s L1 is Cantonese, but she is also a proficient user of English; at the time of the study she was 25 years old, and her only work experience was as a research assistant on another project that had been university based. She was a graduate from a professionally oriented undergraduate English degree program at a Hong Kong university. As part of her undergraduate studies she had taken a range of courses relating to communication in organizational contexts, including Professional and Corporate Discourse, Organizational Culture and Communication, and Intercultural Communication; these gave her a range of perspectives and reflective tools with which to view her experiences in the workplace.

Her brief was to provide a daily account of activities she observed and experienced while at HKPR, noting in particular the ways in which collaboration and creativity—practices central to the functioning of PR activity—operated. In keeping with an interpretive ethnographic approach, her brief was not overly specified, so as not to restrict the lens through which she viewed activity in the organization. An extra dimension to the account lies in the fact that while aware of various aspects of workplace communication as a result of her studies, Sammi was also providing the perspective of a newcomer to the industry, a factor that offered extra insights relating to the second research question, which pertains to the demands made on newcomers to the PR industry.

The resulting journal, a detailed document consisting of around 150 pages (64 working days in total), displayed considerable awareness on her part of the work environment, the practices seen there, and her own developing role in the organization. (Evidence of this last element can be seen in a study of her socialization, reported in Bremner, 2012.)

Although HKPR was involved with a number of projects during the 3-month period that Sammi was working there, this study focused on a single campaign that HKPR was conducting on behalf of a particular client, an organization called CIT, which was running a website targeting teenagers in Asia; the idea behind this site was to provide a platform aimed at fostering responsible online behavior among this age group. At the time of this study, HKPR had been asked to promote a Silent Film Festival, a competition open to 13- to 21-year-olds in the Asia region, that CIT was organizing through its website. All references in the journal relating to the promotion of CIT and the silent film competition were extracted from the larger data set; in addition to the journal, a range of textual data relating to the process was also collected, consisting of the following:

brainstorming notes

annotated drafts of press releases

emails

media-pitching notes

media coverage

Interpretation and analysis of the ethnographic account was carried out by the researcher after the internship; the texts itemized above served as supporting data, and in addition Sammi was interviewed twice after her internship to verify and supplement her account of her observations and experiences, and also to check that the researcher’s understanding of the processes was accurate. The analysis is explained below.

Data Analysis

As noted earlier, all data relating to the CIT brief were separated from the rest; all references to activity relating to CIT were extracted from Sammi’s journal—these amounted to 36 pages, that is, more than a fifth of the total. These data were analyzed with a number of aims in mind:

to establish the chronology of the process

to identify the genres that made up the system

to identify the types of activity surrounding the construction of each genre

to see who was involved, and who contributed in what way

to see what demands these activities made on participants, particularly Sammi.

The various texts (emails, brainstorming notes, drafts of the press release, pitching notes, media coverage) were arranged in order with the goal of tracing the journey of the campaign. These were correlated with the data from Sammi’s journal to ascertain the kinds of inputs and activities surrounding each stage of the process. The client, CIT, came in at the beginning of the 4th week of Sammi’s internship, and Sammi herself played a central part throughout in the work that HKPR carried out for CIT. (In the Findings section the number assigned to each day relates to the CIT campaign; i.e., Day 1 is the day that the client came in.)

Sammi’s journal functions as a straightforward chronological account of activity at HKPR, covering the processes she observed and participated in as well as her reactions to these and other aspects of her work in the organization. Initial analysis of the extracted data relating to the CIT brief indicated that a variety of genres and interactions combined to achieve the goals of the campaign; further analysis led to the identification of certain pivotal phases of activity that made up the process, each of which was constructed by means of a cluster of satellite genres and activities. These pivotal phases were the brainstorming sessions, the drafting of the press release, and the media pitching process. The three identified areas were then analyzed with a view to identifying the contributing genres and the types of interaction (both written and spoken) that surrounded the construction of this phase of the process. A summary of these is presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Genres and Collaborative Interactions Associated With the Three Phases of the Process.

Phase	Associated genres	Collaborative interactions
Brainstorming	• PRHK’s proposal for the client • Client’s website • List of key messages generated for previous client • Lists of taglines from previous projects	• Short brainstorming sessions
Drafting the press release	• Client-related work done by previous interns • Director’s bibliography • List of key messages from client’s website • Updated event information from client • Previous PRHK press releases	• Meeting of all contributors to the press release • Informal meetings to discuss editing • Old timer–newcomer input • Discussion of draft with director
Media-pitching	• Action plan • Media lists (both general and client specific) • Pitching notes • Pitching script • CIT press releases (English and Chinese) • Accompanying emails • Information pack • Event poster • Media-pitching table • Client radio and magazine interviews • Media lunch	• Briefing from senior colleague • Ad hoc meetings (e.g., to modify pitch) • Daily progress meetings • Pitching calls • Follow-up calls

Findings

Each pivotal phase is explained and illustrated below with representative data from the intern’s journal; a summary and explanation of the contributing genres and interactions is provided at the end of each section. All extracts from Sammi’s journal are reported verbatim. (For the purposes of anonymity, all names have been changed.)

Brainstorming Sessions

These were set in train by an email from one of the senior members of the company, Kate, an excerpt from which is shown below:

See key messages from toy festival attached for example

And see attached proposal for CIT for your reference (confidential!)

The PRHK employees brainstorming the set of key messages relating to the client had three other texts to work with: PRHK’s proposal outlining what they were planning to do on behalf of CIT, the CIT website, and a list of key messages generated for a previous client. The list of key messages they produced was then sent to the Director of CIT, who selected a shortlist from these. This was then returned to HKPR, who in turn worked on and developed the messages on this shortlist, as well as adding further messages to it. On the basis of these, the group then generated taglines for the campaign. As with the key messages, the group also had recourse to an earlier set of taglines from previous projects.

The texts that emerged—lists of key messages and taglines—were thus the result of a series of short intensive sessions of brainstorming conducted by members of PRHK, during which they were able to draw on texts and input from the client, and texts from within the agency.

Drafting of Press Release

The next stage of the process was the drafting of the press release. This task was given to Sammi on Day 10 of the CIT brief, about 5 weeks into her internship. Here she explains how she set about this:

Before writing up the press release, I had to read through some background information of CIT: (1) CIT past interns answers plus the director’s biblio, and (2) key messages of CIT website. Besides, I also referred to some of our company’s press releases written in the past, to give me a rough idea of how press release looks like.

The following day (Day 11) she edited the director’s bibliography. However, she experienced some difficulty in starting the press release itself (“How should I write/present it? There’re a large pool of relevant information, how to select and prioritize them in the press release?”). Because of this difficulty she asked for some help from Blair, who explained the format and roughly outlined the content, thus giving her an overall framework for the text.

Much of the next 2 days was spent working on the draft of the press release. An extract from Sammi’s journal (Day 13) illustrates the kinds of activity and involvement on the part of the participants in this:

I was told to finalize the CIT press release by this afternoon, so that it could be sent to the client by today. Kate had edited/revised my first CIT draft. I spent around one hour to clean it up . . . and emailed it to Tom (Director of HKPR) (cc. to Blair) for approval. He edited the draft in hard copy and discussed it with me around 11am.

Two days later (Day 15), the client sent back the draft, at the same time emailing some updated information to be incorporated into the press release. Sammi duly did this and sent it to Kate for further editing, as the document needed to be ready for a meeting with the client later that day. On Day 18, further event information was received from the client, again to be included in an updated version of the press release, setting in motion another bout of revising and editing, captured in this journal extract:

I had to finish the editing by 5pm and passed it to Kate for further editing in the evening. Subsequently, she needed to give her edited draft to Tom by today for final-editing. Thus, we could have the finalized CIT press release for media-pitching next Monday. . . . Similarly, I referred to CIT’s updated event information (which Kate had forwarded to us this morning) and the previous updated press release draft during my editing process. . . . As Tom said in the meeting this morning, he simply wanted to blend the new information into the existing press release. So, I was basically editing based on the previous updated press release draft.

The process of writing the press release took place over a period of 10 working days, involving multiple drafts and revisions, as PRHK worked to improve the document and as new information continued to come in from the client. As with the process of generating key messages and taglines described earlier, participants, notably Sammi in this case, had access to previous examples of press releases produced by the agency to refer to in composing this new text. It can also be seen that four employees from PRHK, as well as the client herself, provided input at various points in the process. In addition to this, there were a number of meetings, mostly informal, in which different participants in the process convened to discuss and work on the document.

Media-Pitching

Following the completion of the press release, the media-pitching process was now the focus, with initial activity centered around preparing an action plan and preparing notes for pitching the client’s activities to the media.

Work relating to this next stage had already started, as HKPR staff had been working on the preparation of a media list (i.e., a list of media who would be contacted) for pitching the CIT story. The next step for Sammi and for Tina, another intern, was to learn how to pitch a story to the media:

There were no briefing guidelines. Tina simply took notes when Blair was teaching her how to do media-pitching.

Prior to the actual pitching of the story, a meeting was held on Day 21 to discuss their approach:

Kate and Blair called upon an ad hoc meeting at 5.15pm to discuss the CIT’s media-pitching action plan. . . . Kate and Blair advised me to extract some key points/words/notes from the finalized CIT press release and the CIT radio interview (which were forwarded by Kate at that time), and I could use it when pitching to the local media.

In order to put together her pitching script, Sammi drew on a number of different texts. This is Day 22:

I was working on the CIT key media-pitching information based on the CIT English and Chinese press releases, plus the notes I had taken in the meeting discussion with Blair yesterday evening. It took me 3hrs. to finish this “pitching script”!

At the same time her colleague, Blair, had been sending out information to local media ahead of the pitching calls they would be making later:

Blair updated me on his CIT media-pitching progress this morning. He sent out the CIT information packet, including the English & Chinese press releases and the event poster, to 6-7 local media (e.g., newspapers, magazines).

As noted earlier, PRHK had prepared a media list from which they could select media to target with the particular stories they were promoting; this list was being constantly updated, as was the information relating to the client. Numerous ad hoc meetings are reported by Sammi, convened, often more than once a day, to review the media-pitching process. What can be seen in these extracts is the ways in which writers are not only drawing on a range of different texts but also recontextualizing information into new texts for particular purposes.

Some days into the process, PRHK’s reflections on the media-pitching process led them to consider altering their approach:

Blair and I sort of discussed the CIT media-pitching strategy this morning. We decided to slightly “modify” our way of pitching, as the media response wasn’t as satisfactory as expected.

On Day 29, they decided to target overseas media in addition to the local media; this necessitated the drafting of a new email to accompany the press release that they were sending out. Again this required Sammi to draw on different textual sources, including updated information relating to the CIT event; she also received input from her colleagues.

Earlier (on Day 28), it was seen that Blair and Sammi were considering modifying their pitching approach, and this issue was raised again on Day 33:

Blair and me sort of discussed the switch of CIT media-pitching’s focus. The pitching materials were indeed the same, but we just wanted to change the way of presenting them to the media.

It was seen throughout this period that many of the elements of the pitching process were repeated, but at the same time participants were required to take in new information as they proceeded, while constantly updating their media-pitching table.

Extra components in the process were also seen on Day 26 in the form of a media lunch, and on Day 39, when PRHK became involved with managing an email interview between an overseas magazine and the client, CIT.

The idea of modifying the pitch in some way, raised in earlier extracts (Days 28 and 33), is now clearly articulated on Day 40:

While I was still searching overseas media’s contact details online, Blair and I discussed and agreed to change the subject line of the CIT media-pitching email at 4:40pm, from “Press Release: An international online magazine/blog for teenagers” to “Press Release: The 1^st international silent film festival contest for teenagers.” The latter certainly highlighted more on the news value of CIT’s event, rather than the former which was just a plain description of CIT.

The repetitive nature of the promotional activity during this period is thoroughly documented by Sammi in her journal—a cycle of pitching to different media, following up initial calls, and then updating the media-pitching table. Nevertheless, the development of the texts used in the pitching process was ongoing, as can be seen from this extract on Day 45:

At 5:30pm, Blair and I collaborated in editing the Chinese press release of CIT for media-pitching. We tried to “condense” the Chinese bullet points into paragraphs form. During the editing process, Blair and I discussed the Chinese word choice with each other and “immersed” some updated CIT information into the press release.

As can be seen from the set of data laid out in this section, the media pitching process is a complex one, involving a range of both written and spoken texts and activities. On the written side, there was the press release itself, the media list (both the master list and the list specifically derived from this for the CIT campaign), the media-pitching notes (in English and Chinese), the media-pitching table (designed to monitor the progress of their pitching activity), and the emails accompanying the press releases, which as was noted, were modified with different audiences in mind. On the spoken side, there was a number of meetings, most of them informal, aimed at planning and reviewing the process, and the phone calls in which the story was pitched to the media. Connected to this was the media pitching script, which falls somewhere between a written and spoken genre in that it serves as a written rehearsal for a spoken event. In addition to these texts above, which were a regular feature of the process, there were also other events such as a media lunch, and two interviews, one with a radio station and one conducted by email with a Thai magazine.

It was observed that the process is to a large extent repetitive, in that participants were operating a cycle of activity that went along the following lines, involving the various texts that have been discussed above:

Prepare media list for specific campaign

Prepare media-pitching notes

Prepare pitching script

Compose email to accompany press release

Send email and press release to media

Follow up email with media pitch by telephone

Note down result of call on media pitching table

Stages 1–4 were the initial elements in the process, followed by Stages 5–7, which operated as a repetitive cycle. This is captured very clearly by Sammi:

The pitching process is just like a cycle:

Search relevant media plus contact information.

Send information to those relevant media by all means, i.e., either by email, fax, or phone calls.

Follow-up by calling those relevant media again – to pitch them more tactfully (i.e., highlighting key promotional messages/selling points to the media.

Yet while this was a recursive cycle, the texts involved were not necessarily static, in that regular ad hoc meetings were convened to discuss the progress of the campaign, and to make modifications, either because the current approach was perceived to be ineffective, or to reframe texts for different audiences.

News Articles in Press

The final outputs of the whole process were the news articles that appeared in the media covering CIT’s activities in general and the Silent Film Festival in particular. In fact CIT received a considerable amount of coverage as a result of the work done on their behalf by PRHK, but this aspect of the process is outside the scope of this article, given that it is focusing on activities within the PR organization.

Discussion

It should be emphasized that the journal contains numerous examples of entries very similar to the extracts presented above: It is believed that this representative selection goes a considerable way towards illuminating the nature of the process. Indeed, the findings demonstrate very clearly the extent to which the press release is intertextually embedded in a larger genre system, and that three major—and to some extent overlapping—cycles of activity were involved in the production and pitching of the press release. The first of these was the series of brainstorming sessions in which the participants produced sets of key messages and taglines, in this process coming to grips with the nature of the client organization and the brief; the second was the production of the press release itself, which entailed an iterative cycle of drafting and discussion; the third was the process of pitching the story to the media, and this involved, as detailed above, a considerable range of spoken and written activities. Table 1 summarizes the various genres and types of collaborative interaction that contributed to the three different phases of the process.

As Zachry (2000b) suggests, “organizational participants rely on long chains of more-or-less routine, genre-mediated communicative exchanges” (p. 63), and the findings here point to the kinds of exchanges that are seen in a PR organization—the features of a “typical sequence” (Bazerman, 1994). On a broader level, the process can be considered as similar to the genre chains that Swales (2004) describes, in that these three cycles of activity took place more or less sequentially, with the different stages following one from one another: In this case we saw brainstorming, followed by the composing of the press release, which in turn led on to the whole media pitching process. However, the activity that took place within these cycles—what might be termed the satellite genres and activities that contributed to these—was a more complex affair.

The dynamic nature of the process (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995) was very evident in all three cycles, in that the texts were constantly developing: the list of key messages and taglines evolved over a series of brainstorming sessions; the press release underwent perhaps as many as 10 separate drafts over a period of 2 weeks; the email sent out with the press release also appeared in several drafts, and was modified on more than one occasion even after the pitching process had started. The changes in these texts took place for three principal reasons: firstly, new information was coming in all the time, and this needed to be incorporated into the texts, particularly the press release and the accompanying email; secondly, because participants—the client herself and members of HKPR—were making contributions at various points throughout the process; and thirdly, because participants were making continual modifications in order to accommodate different audiences (e.g., Chinese, overseas), to mediate the message via different channels (written or spoken, for example), or because they felt that these modifications were necessary to achieve their intended goals: a powerful illustration of the notion of entire systems of workplace activity being “always in flux” (Winsor, 1999, p. 201). Thus, the writing activity was highly recursive in its nature, in that participants were regularly revisiting key texts to harness them more effectively to their promotional efforts; in this respect the process echoes Lindholm’s contention that “the production of a press release is obviously far from a linear process” (2008, p. 47). The findings suggest that the need to continually rework and repackage information to cater for different audiences and to communicate via different channels seems to be a particular feature of practice in PR; this issue is revisited later in the article.

The incidence of intertextuality was a very noticeable element in the process of text construction, and this phenomenon is seen in other PR-related research: Sleurs et al. (2003, p. 203), for example, talk about the writer in their study as having a number of texts at his disposal, while Lindholm (2008) also mentions intertextuality as being a feature of press releases. In this study, there was strong evidence of intertextuality throughout, witnessed in the ways that the discourse traveled through the different stages of the three cycles outlined above, from the key messages to the press release, into the media-pitching process, and finally arriving in the form of media coverage. It is outside the scope of this article to trace the journey of specific items or stretches of discourse through the process, but what was clearly seen was that phrases were adopted at the key message stage, and included in drafts of the press release, then dropped or reworked into later versions, before appearing in the notes or the script of the media-pitching process. While very few phrases made it intact to the other end of the process, that is, into the media coverage, it was seen that participants were constantly appropriating phrases and snatches of discourse from one contributing genre and incorporating them into others, an illustration of Linell’s (1998) point that texts take shape and contribute to the development of new texts in the system as they are recontextualized.

Intertextuality was also seen in the way that the participants drew on other less central texts as they composed the key texts for the CIT brief, such as previous client-related work done by previous interns, and the client’s website and the transcripts of interviews relating to the campaign. Such genres are explained by Swales (2004), as “occluded” (as opposed to “manifest”) in that they are created away from the presence of the writer, yet still have an influence on the process and the resulting texts. It is an advantage of an interpretive ethnographic approach such as this to studying the textual practices of a community that these occluded genres can be revealed.

A further important set of texts in the process was those that PRHK had used for previous campaigns, for example, the set of key messages and earlier press releases that the participants, Sammi in particular, referred to as they went about creating new texts. This phenomenon, an example of what Devitt (1991, 2004) calls generic intertextuality, is reported as a common practice in Flowerdew and Wan’s (2006) study of tax accountants: these accountants regularly drew on previous texts in their organization to produce responses to similar situations, prompting Flowerdew and Wan to observe that “intertextuality both defines and serves the needs of the accounting community” (p. 150). Given the somewhat conventionalized generic structure of the press release, it is conjectured that appropriations of this kind would be regularly seen in the PR industry.

The third major element of the process very much in evidence in this study was the extent to which it was a collaborative endeavor. There were inputs at every stage from different participants in the process, including the client—an example of less visible practice (similar to the notion of “occluded genres” [Swales, 2004] alluded to earlier) described by Witte (1992) as “covert collaboration,” involving interactions among writers, conscious or otherwise, through “both linguistic and non-linguistic texts” (p. 296). Collaborative inputs were seen in the brainstorming sessions at the beginning, the multiple contributions to the press release itself, and the planning and ongoing modification of the media-pitching process. They came in both written and spoken form, the latter often seen in the many ad hoc informal meetings that were called to discuss specific issues, or simply for the purpose of providing updates on the process: a high incidence of what Debs calls “talk about text” (1991), and similar to the “continuous interplay” between spoken and written discourse (Gunnarsson, 1997) mentioned above.

The collaborative activity can be seen as more than merely an inherent feature of writing of the type discussed by Reither (1993), but a very active form of collaboration. Two features of the collaborative interactions in HKPR are worthy of note: the first is the somewhat hierarchical nature of collaborative editing, as texts tended to be passed up through the organization to be edited. A second, related issue is the incidence of collaboration for learning purposes—instances where Sammi and Tina were inducted into certain PR-related activities, notably writing press releases and media-pitching, by their more experienced colleagues. A final point in relation to collaboration is that the participants in this particular organization appeared to be working in a considerable degree of harmony, but this is not always the case: Often writers need to take on board the perspectives of different internal audiences, and these may be divergent (Pander Maat, 2008; Sleurs et al., 2003; Sleurs & Jacobs, 2005).

Demands Made on Participants

The findings from the study show that the construction and pitching of a press release is a complex process that makes a range of demands on those involved. It is perhaps the dynamic nature of the texts involved in the process that places one of the most central demands on participants: essentially they are working with and drawing on multiple texts, managing new information as it comes in, incorporating and recontextualizing it as they compose. There is also the possibility, as mentioned above, that they will need to try and accommodate views and inputs of a divergent nature. The other main demand is brought about by the fact that this information needs to reach a diverse set of readers; thus the PR practitioner is continually repackaging information for different audiences, and via different media, written and spoken. The extract below from Sammi’s journal captures this aspect of the demands made on participants:

Meanwhile, I understood more about media-pitching: when you’re pitching to local news department, your focus should be put on the “Silent Film Festival” event details; while you’re pitching to education column, you should concentrate more on the CIT website. You’ve different ways of pitching—it all depends on who you’re pitching to and how you pitch!

This observation made by Sammi is an instance of learning in action. Given the multiplicity of situations and the diversity of clients that PR practitioners deal with, there is always likely to be an element of novelty in the scenarios they face, and in that sense writing press releases is always a learning process. What we see in this study, however, are the experiences of someone new to the profession, and we are thus afforded a special insight into the challenges and uncertainties that a newcomer encounters when they enter the PR industry.

The demands of dealing with a process that is in an almost continual state of flux have been explained above, but in addition to these we see here evidence of other challenges. An important example seen here is the lack of formal guidelines for two key genres, namely, the press release itself and the media-pitching telephone calls. In the case of the former, Sammi displays uncertainty over how to present and organize the press release, in particular how to select and prioritize information; as for the latter, we see her fellow intern Tina learning the media-pitching ropes without any briefing guidelines; in both cases, they depend to a considerable extent on being inducted by old timers, a collaborative practice referred to earlier. The issue of time is also a central consideration: not only are learners having to come to terms with an unfamiliar process that is continually evolving, and having to make regular additions and modifications to different texts, sifting through and making sense of a variety of text sources as they do so, they also have to do this within fairly tight time frames, a factor that can only add extra pressure.

Conclusion

Zachry (2000a) warns of the dangers of thinking of genres such as the annual report or the résumé “as if they existed autonomously” (p. 100), and this observation is particularly pertinent in the case of the press release: to become a successful PR practitioner, it is not just a question of learning one particular genre, but of learning how to manage an interconnected process that is constantly evolving, and of learning how to rework and repackage information on a regular basis, an activity that requires an understanding of the relationships between mode and audience and text. In addition, practitioners in this field—as with almost every profession—need the skills that are associated with effective collaboration.

In common with other studies of the processes associated with the construction of press releases (e.g., Sleurs et al., 2003; Sleurs & Jacobs, 2005), this study has viewed activity through the lens of an individual participant. For this reason, one needs to be wary of overly extrapolating from what has been presented here. Nevertheless, it has been shown that the process of writing and managing press releases is a complex one that places a range of demands on participants. Moreover, this article, in using the journal of an intern, has provided a perspective on the process that helps us understand some of the issues that would be relevant for a newcomer in this kind of workplace. It is outside the scope of this article to address the pedagogical implications of these findings in any detail; however, it should be mentioned that a search through four randomly chosen textbooks dealing with PR writing found no mention of the aspects of the process identified here, that is, its dynamic, recursive, intertextual, and collaborative nature. Teaching approaches that ignore these features of the press release production process risk providing students with an incomplete picture of the complexities and challenges that await them in the PR workplace.

Interestingly, Pope-Ruark (2008) envisages workplace scenarios that are more complex than those described in this study: Referring to writers in integrated marketing communications agencies, she talks of them learning “from afar about how each client would like to be represented to its specifically segmented public, often while juggling multiple clients with vastly different brand strategies and organizational voices” (p. 187). In describing such scenarios, she highlights the considerable challenges that lie ahead for those involved in preparing students for the PR and marketing industries.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research on which this article is based was made possible by an HKSAR Government Funded Research Project (GRF) 2007-2010, entitled Collaborative Writing in the Creative Communication Industries: Professional and Pedagogical Perspectives. GRF Project No: 9041281. Other contributors receiving support: Dr. Rodney Jones, Prof. Vijay Bhatia, and Dr. Anne Pierson-Smith.

Author Biography

Stephen Bremner works in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses relating to professional communication. His main research interests relate to workplace writing, in particular the ways in which texts are constructed, and the issue of how students make the transition from the academy to the workplace.

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