A snowmobile sits on a pile of trucked-in snow in the middle of an Austrian shopping street. It is not going anywhere. A rider poses on it, a rope line keeps the public back, and behind that rope a dozen photographers and two video crews work the same three angles for twenty minutes. Nobody is selling a snowmobile to anybody standing there. The machine is a prop, the snow is set dressing, and the actual product being manufactured is a photograph.

The press release survives as a document type in almost perfect health. Volume is up. The wire services are profitable. Companies still employ people whose primary output is a two-page document beginning with a city name and a date, containing a quotation from an executive that no executive said. What has died is the mechanism the format was built for. The release now persists for reasons that have nothing to do with communicating with a journalist, and understanding which reasons those are tells you what the format is turning into.