How newspaper journalists reframe product press release information

Abstract

Newspaper journalism is said to increasingly depend on PR sources and news agencies. However, news production evolves in several phases. There may be considerable source dependency in the news discovery phase, but sources may be less prominent in the later phases of news gathering and news writing. This study concentrates on the last two phases and analyzes how Dutch journalists rework product launch press releases into newspaper reports. Forty-nine pairs of releases and news reports were analyzed sentence by sentence. Compared to press releases, news reports provide less product or company information and more contextual information, provide less positive and more negative evaluations, and more often attribute information to sources. Overall, less than half of the information in the reports originates from the releases. A framing analysis learns that while releases adopt an advertising frame focused on selling the product, reports offer two kinds of reframing: they regularly recontextualize the release information by adding consumer information and occasionally reconceptualize the launch as a business move. Both the distancing operations and the reframings enhance the report’s usability to news consumers. However, radical transformations are rare: most reframings occur later on in the report and the primary frame of the source text is often left in place.

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