NEWS PRESS RELEASES IN DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS: A contrastive genre and corpus-based approach to promoting inclusiveness within two LGBT+ organizations

Press releases as a genre can be seen as a pre-formulation device for news reports, highlighting the relationship emerging between press release writers and journalists (Jacobs 1999). Within genre studies (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), company press releases have been shown to exhibit a set of standard moves and strategies (McLaren, Gurau 2005), which reveal their hybrid nature resulting from the tension between informative and promotional goals (Catenaccio 2008). However, the status of the press release as a genre has been questioned due to a continuous variation in stage combinations and communicative purposes (Lassen 2006). Digital technologies have also challenged the textual structure and the participation framework of the genre (Catenaccio 2008). This paper concentrates on non-profit organizations and examines the language and features of a pilot corpus of online news press releases retrieved from the webpages of a British LGBT+ charity (Stonewall) and of its closest Italian counterpart, the Italian LGBT+ organization Arcigay. From a genre perspective, the results suggest recourse to the same (recursive) rhetorical moves, which serve informative purposes and, crucially, are primarily promotional and persuasive in nature. Additionally, based on the corpus-informed analysis, investigation into the collocational patterns of selected top lexical keywords for each corpus (vis-à-vis EnTenTen20 and ItTenTen20), as well as their concordances, showed that both organizations presented themselves as cohesive and committed communities promoting inclusiveness, and supporting LGBT+ people and communities, which are discursively framed as threatened by homo-bi-transphobic violence.