> It‘s about making things as convenient as possible for journalists
I'm not so sure about that being the principal motive. I think it's actually a way to exert control. I remember discussions with our marketing folks. Pretty eye-opening.
"Communication," in corporations, is really about controlling and shaping the message, and building the brand.
You see these coordinated campaigns, all the time. Usually, they are efforts to control the vocabulary (for example, instead of calling camera flashes "flashes," we try to always refer to them as "speedlights," and get everyone else to use the same language).
Also, you have things like entertainers starting to behave badly, just as their albums and movies are coming out, etc. I'll bet that publicists ask entertainers to time things like divorce announcements, with significant market events.
I mean, sure, controlling the message is how you can call it, but that doesn’t mean the legal threats (or threats of any kind) are doing the actual controlling.
When I say “it‘s about making things as convenient as possible for journalists” what I mean by that (and what I thought I had made pretty clear) is not that convenience for the journalist is the ultimate goal.
The ultimate goal is to get the messages about your announcement you want to have published published. The convenience is a stepping stone towards that destination. That way you exert control without force or threats. It’s the carrot.
Which is not to say that threats are absent from corporate communication. Just not as part of press release writing and publishing.
But I wonder if, let's say, a media organization were to publish a "hit piece," based on the text, if you could send a DMCA notice to their hosting provider.
If you want a PR nightmare for yourself, then that’s how you create one.
There is probably more than a century of tradition and expectations around how journalists can work with press releases. Whether companies could sue them for releasing press releases (it‘s in the name!) is in that light mostly theoretical. Because no one would sue.
It‘s about making things as convenient as possible for journalists, not legal enforcement of anything.