Look who's talking: systematic literature review of corporate media interviews

Purpose The purpose of this article is (1) to present the findings of a systematic literature review of scholarship on corporate media interviews, (2) to compare the study of corporate media interviews across disciplines and (3) to identify gaps and future opportunities for corporate communications research. Design/methodology/approach The systematic literature review identified articles on corporate media interviews, published from 2000 to 2024 in 50 leading Corporate Communication/Public Relations, Journalism, Management/Organization and Critical Discourse Analysis journals, and scholarly books on media interviews published in that time frame. The review included a quantitative content analysis and qualitative thematic synthesis of the journal articles. Findings The systematic literature review found corporate media interview studies to be few and far between. Corporate media interview research was found in just 33 articles (in 19 journals) published between 2000 and 2024. Corporate media interviews were barely mentioned in the scholarly books on media interviews. A comparison of the corporate communications research with that from other disciplines highlights directions in which corporate communications research might expand, such as corporate media interview typology, interviewee demographics, interaction between interviewer and interviewee, short-term event studies using external data and the analysis of more actual interviews (to supplement the studies using simulated interviews). Originality/value This article is the first systematic literature review, to the author's knowledge, of scholarly studies of corporate media interviews, a ubiquitous but understudied form of external corporate communications.