The publication of press releases as journalistic information. Comparative study of two Spanish newspapers

Abstract

The distinction of what constitutes a “news event” can give rise to many interpretations. In this world of telematic accessibility, which is a consequence of globalization, events and occurrences of all kinds can be categorized as news simply by dressing them up as news. According to the style and communications manuals, the news has its own characteristics: relevance, social interest and proximity, among others. Press releases have become perfected as a result of increasingly sophisticated public relations agencies, and with them the thin line between information and advertising is now blurred. In this paper, we compare press releases issued by public and private companies with news briefs in the Economy sections of newspapers. As will be seen, many of them coincide and bear some similarities. The sample uses news briefs published during the first half of 2014 in El Mundo and La Vanguardia, Spanish pay-to-read newspapers that feature prominently in the analysis by the Estudio General de Medios (General Media Study). The methodology makes use of the Maple program with its DetectPlagiarism command to perform an ad hoc comparison of the texts. The default copy threshold for DetectPlagiarism is 0.35. The similarity indices between the news briefs and the press releases of La Vanguardia and El Mundo indicate values higher than this threshold.