Upgrade StorageWho is the author for a press release?
What do you put in the "Author" field for press releases? Some ideas and potential objections that occur to me at the moment are below:
1. The person(s) who wrote the press release. (Objection: that is often undisclosed. And when a name is mentioned, it is often an editor rather than the actual author, who is often an unnamed freelance ghostwriter.)
2. The Institution. Example: Harvard University. (Objection: The institution belongs in the "Website Title" field instead.)
3. The name of the press department? Example: "Office of Public and Media Relations". (Objection: that may look strange for in-text citations).
Habits, opinions, objections, etc. are welcome!
1. The person(s) who wrote the press release. (Objection: that is often undisclosed. And when a name is mentioned, it is often an editor rather than the actual author, who is often an unnamed freelance ghostwriter.)
2. The Institution. Example: Harvard University. (Objection: The institution belongs in the "Website Title" field instead.)
3. The name of the press department? Example: "Office of Public and Media Relations". (Objection: that may look strange for in-text citations).
Habits, opinions, objections, etc. are welcome!
Re: 1 ...person(s)
Suppose I know the name of the ghostwriter, but the institution doesn't report it on the press release.
A. Is it bad form to put that ghostwriter's name in the author field?
B. If so, is it bad form to make the institutional employees that edited the press release the "authors" or "contributors" if their name also isn't on the press release?
(Thanks for your patience with my questions. I'm hoping to settle on a fairly generalizable decision tree for this, going forward.)
The only exceptions I can think of is if you're specifically studying that component of corporate communications or if the ghostwrite became well known for some reason and you're interested in their writing specifically (say, if Matt Damon wrote press releases for Harvard as a work study ;)
And your policy "for most cases" seems to align with the APA's 7th ed. recommends "Provid[ing] the name of the group that released the press release as the author" (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/press-release-references).
Example:
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2019, November 15). FDA approves first contact lens indicated to slow the progression of nearsightedness in children [Press release]. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-contact-lens-indicated-slow-progression-nearsightedness-children
(i) Parenthetical citation: (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2019)
(ii) Narrative citation: U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2019)
So I'll probably opt for 2 (the institution) for press releases (unless/until my most-used style guide changes).