Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: Journalists’ Perceptions and Usage of Press Releases

Abstract

Exploring reputation and organizational communication, this study tests how journalists perceive press releases containing grammatical errors. Journalists (n = 118) read a press release with or without errors from an existing or unknown company. Journalists ranked the press releases without errors more favorably, regardless of their perceptions of the company. Additionally, press releases from the existing company were ranked more favorably than those from the unknown one, regardless of errors. Notably, there were no interaction effects, which suggests that reputation cannot overcome negative error effects and that polished writing cannot overcome negative corporate perception effects. Implications for the public relations–journalism relationship are discussed, as is the legitimacy of using unknown organizations when testing reputation via experiments.