For years, researchers have examined financial data in corporate earnings announcements and their influence on market participants. More recently, a body of research has been developing recognizing the impact of narrative disclosures and managers' deliberate language choices. However, no prior studies have investigated those language choices of managers which are likely unintentional in composing such narratives; language choices which, as previous research has revealed, escape conscious access. Using an empirically-grounded model which systematically classifies different predicates, I examined whether managers use systematic patterns of language when construing the earnings press release in a likely unintentional effort to channel or direct readers' attention. I found that managers write positive information using a more concrete construal than negative information. Additionally, I used experimental data to examine whether these systematic differences lead to different perceptions of the company and its value as an investment alternative. Nonprofessional investors performed an analysis of an earnings press release where I manipulated the valence of the narrative as positive or negative and the construal of the narrative as abstract or concrete. I found that these manipulations had an interactive influence on investment decisions. Specifically, investors were least likely to invest when a negatively valenced narrative was written concretely. I also found that the influence of the narrative on the investment decision was direct and not the result of the narrative influencing the investors' focus of attention on the accompanying financial statements. Additionally, I tested whether the investor judgments were due to intentional cognitive effects and found that the influence of the narrative on the investment decision was not conscious on the part of the investor. Lastly, I conducted an analysis of archival data to examine the relationship between managers' language use in forward-looking statements of the earnings press release and future firm performance and the extent to which the market responds to these linguistic clues. Results from the analysis suggest that construal is predictive of future firm performance and the market is incorporating this into pricing for firms that meet or beat earnings expectations.

This paper analyzes the NBA's communications efforts from June 4 to July 30, 2020 as it prepared for an unprecedented season restart in the early days of a global pandemic. While scholars have examined the media's framing of the NBA in this period, there is a gap in the literature when looking at the official NBA communications strategy of the organization itself. As the first study to use risk communication theory in a sports scenario while also employing corporate social advocacy as the second theoretical basis of analysis, this qualitative study is a thematic and textual analysis of 14 NBA press releases and three existing video interviews of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. Findings show that risk communication theory holds up in a sports context as the NBA employed effective use of widely accepted risk communication criteria. The study also puts forth a basis for CSA in sports communication regarding social justice.

Carema Care (numera Vardaga) är ett privat ägt vårdföretag med verksamhet inom äldreomsorgen. Under hösten och vintern 2011 utsattes företaget för en intensiv mediebevakning där de anklagades för besparingar och vanvård. I denna uppsats undersöks Carema Cares externa kriskommunikation under mediedrevet. Kriskommunikationen analyseras utifrån situational crisis communication theory. Teorin beskriver vilka försvarsstrategier som ett företag kan och bör använda för att rädda sitt anseende. Teorin gör gällande att den viktigaste faktorn vid val av försvarsstrategi bör vara typ av kris som uppstått. Studien har utgått ifrån en kvalitativ textanalys med systematiserande frågeställningar och klassificering som tillvägagångssätt. Först analyserades nio nyhetsartiklar för att försöka fastställa vilken typ av kris som ägt rum. Därefter studerades Carema Cares pressmeddelanden för att identifiera vilka försvarsstrategier som Carema Care använt sig av och om dessa överensstämmer med vad som föreskrivs inom situational crisis communication theory. Resultatet visar på att Carema Care inte i något pressmeddelande använt sig av de försvarsstrategier som föreskrivs i situational crisis communication theory. / Carema Care (now by the name Vardaga) is a privately owned company within the field of elder care. During the autumn and winter of 2011, the company was the focal point of an intense media reporting. The company was accused of budget cuts and neglected care. This thesis investigates the external crisis communication from Carema Care during the intense media reporting. The crisis communication is analyzed using situational crisis communication theory. The theory describes which crisis response strategies that a company can and shall use when faced with a crisis in order to restore its image. The theory claims that the most important factor when choosing crisis response strategy is what type of crisis that has occurred. The investigation was carried out using qualitative text analysis, more specifically the method systematic questions and classification was used. In the first step, nine news articles were analyzed in order to determine what type of crisis that had occurred. In the second step, the press releases following each news article were analyzed in order to determine what response strategy that had been used and how it compared to what the theory recommended. The study shows that Carema Care did not use the response strategy recommended from situational crisis communication theory in any of its press releases.

Title: Requirements of Selected Czech Media for Media Relations of Sports Organisations Objectives: The objective of this thesis is to synthesize sports media's opinions on media relations of sports organizations in Czech republic. The aim is to create a document that will have the potential to improve communication between media and Czech sports organizations. Methods: The qualitative method of interviews was used for data collection, alongside with a guideline based on theoretical framework. Respondents were selected by targeted sampling employing criteria. Interviews were recorded and subsequently transcribed into written form. Obtained data were processed by the deductive method of thematic analysis. Results: The result of this thesis is a summary of requests from media representatives. The results reflect the theoretical framework with practical comments for the Czech sports environment. Overall, media representatives focus on trust from sports organizations and their representatives. They recall that a media output is also a part of a sports career of athletes. They wish to be seen as someone who is a partner in spreading information to the public and fans, not as an enemy. Keywords: public relations, communication, press release, press conference, sports media, media guide, media room,...

I valupptakten hösten 2010 fick Sverigedemokraternas två valfilmer oerhört genomslag i media, och hade inte mindre än en halv miljon visningar på Youtube, på bara några få dagar. Denna här uppsatsen undersöker vilka strategier som ligger bakom ett sådant genomslag i media. Frågeställningen försöker besvara vilka verklighetsbeskrivningar som TV4 respektive Sverigedemokraterna (SD) ger i sitt pressmaterial angående lanseringen av SD:s två valfilmer, och vad de får för effekter. Uppsatsen analyserar nyckelord som används, vilken ram de sätter på situationen och om SD använder sig av anti-etablissemangsstrategin. Den diskuterar också omkring problemformuleringsprivilegiet, det vill säga att den som formulerar frågeställningen alltid äger tolkningsföreträdet till den. Uppsatsens slutsats är att SD:s strategi vid lanseringen av valfilmen var att synliggöra och förstärka avståndet mellan SD och etablissemanget, såväl till politiska partier som till media. SD använde sig av de egna problemformuleringarna massinvandring och censur, som i sin tur skapade egna ramar, till vilka enbart SD hade tolkningsföreträde. SD:s ramar stämmer tydligt överrens med vilka kriterier ett politiskt parti måste ha för att använda sig av anti-etablissemangsstrategin. / In the fall of 2010 during the election, the Swedish Democrats launched two election movies who got a enormous breakthrough in the media. They got over half a million views on Youtube in just a few days. This essay investigates what strategies that lays behind the breakthrough in the Swedish media. The inquiry tries to answer what description of reality that TV4 and the Swedish Democrats leaves in their press material concerning the launch of the Swedish Democrats two election movies and following effects. The essay analyses keywords in these movies, the frame of the situation and if the Swedish Democrats uses the anti-establishment strategy. It also discuss the problem formulation privilege, which means that the person who formulate the inquiry always own the right to interpret the inquiry. The conclusion of the essay is that the Swedish Democrats strategy during the launch of the election movies, was to expose and strengthen the distance between the Swedish Democrats and the establishment. As well as between other political parties and media. The Swedish Democrats formulate their own problem formulation using words as “mass migration” and “censorship”. With these two words they create their own frames that gives the Swedish Democrats the total interpret of the words. The frames that the Swedish Democrats are using, agrees with the criteria of what a political party must contain to use the anti-establishment strategy.

This diploma thesis aims to describe comprehensive processes of intercultural communication in a Czech PR agency. The agency's mediation activity is seen in a broader context - not only as the one of a mere intermediary supplying translation and interpreting services provided by local third-party subcontractors, but the one of an active element that co-creates and completes the final shape of these products and services. First of all, we are going to introduce our topic in the context of the existing research made in translation studies, media studies and marketing communications theory. The empirical part of this thesis consists of a case study of a selected Czech PR agency. We used qualitative methods in order to gain data enabling to describe communications processes heading from the client, i.e. a foreign company (seen as the author and primary contracting entity), through the agency (the manipulator) to the translator, and then back to the agency and through its mediation to the primary recipients, i.e. Czech mass media. Besides the description of these processes, subsequently summarized in several basic models, we will also focus on the form of the intercultural communications products, as well as the norms that govern their form. We will use a translation analysis to identify whether these...

In late 2019, the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) began. The viral disease, also known as covid-19, started spreading from China to large parts of the world in early 2020, resulting in a large number of cases, deaths, as well as major impacts on the economy of nations, organizations, and individuals alike. In order to limit the spread of the virus, several pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, initiated a vaccine development. This process led pharmaceutical companies to communicat ea large amount of corporate news to investors, among other stakeholders. Previous research has shown how the stock market responds to corporate news. However, prior to this study, a lack of research on how the stock market behaves in relation to corporate news announced by companies under difficult global conditions was identified. The aim of this study is to investigate the stock market's reaction to press releases by Moderna and Pfizer regarding their vaccine development for covid-19. The methods used to study the subject are based on analysis of historical share price data and the calculation of abnormal returns. The results have to some extent indicated that selected press releases have played a significant role as an influencer in relation to investor sentiment and the stock market’s behavior. In terms of the result as a whole, the number of significant days is not sufficient to support the alternative hypothesis. Market reactions in the share prices were identified on the dates surrounding the press releases regarding the vaccine-development, but since only 22 percent of the abnormal yield was significant, the result did not appear to be aligned with the alternative hypothesis. / Under slutet av år 2019 började spridningen av coronaviruset SARS-CoV-2 (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2). Virussjukdomen, i folkmun känd som covid-19, började under år 2020 spridas från Kina till stora delar av övriga världen, vilket har resulterat i ett stort antal insjuknade, dödsfall och även en påverkan på såväl nationers som organisationers och individers ekonomi. För att begränsa spridningen av viruset påbörjade ett flertal läkemedelsbolag en vaccinframtagning. Denna process ledde till att läkemedelsbolagen kommunicerade en stor mängd bolagsnyheter till omvärlden, däribland investerare. Tidigare forskning har visat hur aktiemarknaden svarat på bolagsnyheter, men inför denna studie identifierades en brist på forskning kring hur aktiemarknaden agerar i förhållande till bolagsnyheter under extrema världssituationer likt coronaviruspandemin. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka marknadens reaktion till följd av pressmeddelanden från företagen Moderna och Pfizer rörande vaccinutvecklingen för covid-19. Reaktionen studeras med hjälp av historiska aktiekursdata och beräkning av onormal avkastning. Resultaten har till en viss del indikerat på att utvalda pressmeddelanden har spelat en signifikant roll som påverkande faktor gentemot aktiemarknaden. Sett till resultatet i sin helhet är antalet signifikanta dagar inte tillräckligt för att utgöra stöd till alternativhypotesen. Marknadsreaktioner kunde identifieras till följd av pressmeddelanden om vaccinutvecklingen, men eftersom enbart 22 procent av den onormala avkastningen var signifikant så föreföll inte resultatet i linje med alternativhypotesen.

The use cases of Information Extraction (IE) are more or less endless, often consisting of a combination of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). One use case of IE is the extraction of transaction information from Norwegian insider transaction Press Releases (PRs), where a transaction consists of at most four entities: the name of the owner performing the transaction, the number of shares transferred, the transaction date, and the price of the shares bought or sold. The relationships between the entities define which entity belongs to which transaction, and whether shares were bought or sold. This report has investigated how a pair of supervised NER and RE models extract this information. Since these Norwegian PRs were not labeled, two different approaches to annotating the transaction entities and their associated relations were investigated, and it was found that it is better to annotate only entities that occur in a relation than annotating all occurrences. Furthermore, the number of PRs needed to achieve a satisfactory result in the IE pipeline was investigated. The study shows that training with about 400 PRs is sufficient for the results to converge, at around 0.85 in F1-score. Finally, the report shows that there is not much difference between a complex RE model and a simple rule-based approach, when applied on the studied corpus.

This diploma thesis focuses on an analysis of crisis communication in food retail chains, using pragmatic linguistic methods. In the theoretical part I deal with speech acts theory from the viewpoint of John L. Austin and Emile Benveniste, Grice's Cooperative Principles and the Theory of Argumentation. I use all these methods in analyzing press releases published by retail chains in the case of a negative food affair. I am therefore interested in the way those linguistic tools are used by the authors in the press releases in order to communicate most effectively in a time of crisis, so as to prevent the loss of either costumers or the good name of the company. I will also focus on the most frequent mistakes made by the authors of press releases. The aim of my thesis is to find out whether it is possible to find some repetitive mechanisms used in the communication of different crisis topics. The main hypothesis is that although there are different crisis situations which need to be communicated, communication methods used in individual press releases are similar and they often recur. Key words: pragmatics, speech acts, cooperative principles, argumentation, crisis communication, food affair, press release.

Press releases play a key role in today’s news production by being public statements of newsworthy content that function as a pre-formulation of news. Press releases originate from a wide range of actors, and a common goal is for them to reach a high societal impact. This thesis examines how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be successful in giving feedback to press release authors that help enhance the content and quality of their texts. This could, in turn, contribute to increased impact. To examine this, the research question is divided into two parts. The first part examines how content-perception feedback can contribute to improving press releases. This is examined by the development of a web tool where user- written press releases get analyzed. The analysis consists of a readability assessment using the LIX metric and linguistic bias detection of weasel words and peacock words through rule-based sentiment analysis. The user experiences and opinions are evaluated through an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The second part of the research question examines how trending topic information can contribute to improving press releases. This part is examined theoretically based on a literature review of state-of-the- art methods and qualitatively by gathering opinions from press release authors in the previously mentioned questionnaire and interviews. Based on the results, it is identified that for content-perception feedback, it is especially lesser experienced authors and scientific content aimed at the general public that would achieve improved text quality from objective readability assessment and detection of biased expressions. Nevertheless, most of the evaluation participants were more satisfied with their press releases after editing based on the readability feedback, and all participants with biased words in their texts reported that the detection led to positive changes resulting in improved text quality. As for the theoretical part, it is considered that both text quality and the number of publications increase when writing about trending topics. To give authors trending topic information on a detailed level is indicated to be the most helpful. / Aktörer som sträcker sig från privata företag till mydigheter och forskare använder pressmeddelanden för att offentligt delge information med nyhetsvärde. Dessa pressmeddelanden spelar därefter en nyckelroll i dagens nyhetsproduktion genom att förformulera nyheter och eftersträvar därför att hålla en viss språklig nivå. För att förbättra kvalitet och innehåll i pressmeddelanden undersöker detta examensarbete hur språkteknologisk textanalys och återkoppling till författare kan stödja dem i att förbättra sina texter. Denna frågeställning undersöks i två delar, en tillämpad del och en teoretisk del. Den tillämpade delen undersöker hur återkoppling kring innehållsuppfattning kan förbättra pressmeddelanden. Ett webb-baserat verktyg utvecklades där användare kan skriva in pressmeddelanden och få dessa analyserade. Analysen baseras på läsbarhet som bedöms med hjälp av måttet LIX samt språklig bias (partiska uttryck) i form av weasel words (vessleord) och peacock words (påfågelord) som detekteras genom regelbaserad sentimentanalys. Denna del utvärderades kvalitativt genom en enkätundersökning till användarna samt djupintervjuer. Den teoretiska delen av frågeställningen undersöker hur information om trendande ämnen kan bidra till att förbättra pressmeddelanden. Undersökningen genomfördes som en litteraturstudie och utvärderades kvalitativt genom att sammanställa åsikter från yrkesverksamma som arbetar med pressmeddelanden i enkätundersökningen och djupintervjuerna som beskrevs ovan. Resultaten indikerar att för feedback om innehållsuppfattning är det särskilt mindre erfarna författare och vetenskapligt innehåll riktat till allmänheten som skulle uppnå förbättrad textkvalitet till följd av läsbarhetsbedömning och upptäckt av partiska uttryck. Samtidigt var en majoritet av deltagarna i utvärderingen mer nöjda med sina pressmeddelanden efter redigering baserat på läsbarhetsfeedbacken. Dessutom rapporterade alla deltagare med partiska uttryck i sina texter att upptäckten ledde till positiva förändringar som resulterade i förbättrad textkvalitet. Gällande den teoretiska delen anses både textkvaliteten och antalet publikationer öka för pressmeddelnanden om trendande ämnen. Att ge författare information om trendande ämnen på en detaljerad nivå indikeras vara det mest hjälpsamma.