Constructing newsworthiness in institutional research press releases: An applied corpus study

This paper looks at the under-researched genre of the institutional research press release, examining how the writers of these press releases recontextualise scientific/academic research as news. To approach this, it first takes the concept of Discursive News Values (DNVs), and conducts a quantitative study of the way these are reflected in three different moves within the text: the headlines and leads, the body of the text, and the quotations from experts. The results confirm previous research that identifies a special role not only for the headline and lead, but also for the quoted material, and extends our knowledge by quantifying the presence of DNVs in each move and investigating the roles they play. This paper shows how the re-contextualisation of research as news is habitually accomplished through the effective operationalisation of DNVs in distinct ways in these three major areas of the text.