Genres and Processes in the PR Industry

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:

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:

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.

OPEN IN VIEWER

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.)

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).

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.