Beyond preformulation: an ethnographic perspective on press releases

It has been shown that press releases are heavily preformulated, that is to say, they exhibit a number of metapragmatic features that make it easy for journalists to copy them in their own news reporting. The present article sets out to further explore this notion of preformulation by presenting ethnography-based work on how press releases are being written at the public relations (PR) department of a major Belgian bank. In particular, zooming in on the complex story of the bank's sponsoring involvement in an educational website, we will demonstrate how our fieldwork serves to foreground some of the practical as well as political concerns that have been glossed over in previous discourse-analytic and (semi-)experimental writing on the topic.