The Informative-Promotional Continuum: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Promotional Strategies in Meta’s Press Releases

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to investigate the promotional strategies and conventions employed by practitioners in the field of Public Relations at Meta, Inc., namely the promotional elements that characterize the info-promotional genre of online press releases. Due to the focus on professional practice, the study required the application of multiple levels of analysis. Firstly, a corpus-driven analysis of press releases and promotional texts published by Meta, Inc., and newspaper articles based on the press releases issued by the company, laid the foundation for the research questions presented in the Introduction: do the press releases issued by Meta contain a relevant number of promotional elements, and does promotional discourse in press releases have a negative impact on the way journalists receive and report on their content? Secondly, a textual analysis of Meta’s press releases was conducted so as to identify any conventions concerning the organizational structure of this specific text genre. Finally, to contextualize the research in terms of professional practice and performance, the findings were interpreted in the light of the Genre Analysis and Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) studies developed by Vijay K. Bhatia over the past three decades. Chapter 1 offers a literature review aimed at understanding what a press release is and how the study of this genre has been approached by scholars through the application of Corpus Linguistics, Genre Analysis, and Critical Genre Analysis. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the methodology used to either confirm or refute the hypotheses upon which the study is based, and it clarifies how the corpus used for the analysis was collected and analyzed. A computer-assisted analysis of the corpus (Chapter 3) showed that press releases published by the company’s Communications team on the Meta Newsroom portal are characterized by elements that are typical of advertising discourse, namely the use of personal pronouns and informal style of writing. Moreover, it was possible to identify some elements that distinguish press releases from advertisements and news articles, such as extensive use of future tenses and modal verbs to project a positive image of the company and its activities into the future. Finally, the application of the Genre Analysis model (Chapter 4) allowed for the identification of a set of recurrent 'cognitive moves' in the structural format of Meta's press releases. It is necessary to point out that some of the findings, especially as concerns the use of self-referential techniques and personal pronouns, contradict the outcome of previous studies on the same subject (Jacobs 1999 a, b; McLaren and Gurau 2005; Molino 2019). This means that different communities of practitioners in the field of Public Relations adopt different conventions based on specific communicative purposes. Forasmuch as the ethnographic research methods required by CGA could not be applied due to time limitations, further research on the subject of the press release should focus on conducting interviews and surveys with Public Relations professionals.