Every press release ends the same way: with a short paragraph, usually under an “About” heading, that introduces the organisation behind the announcement. That paragraph is the boilerplate — the one part of the document that is written once and then carried, unchanged, from release to release. Because it is never the news, it is easy to treat it as furniture. Because journalists lift it verbatim when they need background, it is worth treating as anything but.

Most questions about the boilerplate press release are really questions about that single paragraph: what belongs in it, how long it should be, how honest it has to be, and who keeps it current. This article answers them in order — the elements, the drafting standard, length, versions, placement, the distinctions that protect the paragraph from mission statements and advertising, upkeep, the common mistakes, and one worked example for a fictional company, written to the standard the article sets.

What a Boilerplate Is

The word itself is a printing term. In the era of hot-metal newspapers, a boilerplate was a ready-made plate of standing text — supplied, durable and reusable — that a paper could drop into a page without setting it afresh. The press release borrowed the word for the same reason: the paragraph is pre-cast. It identifies the issuing organisation for a reader who may know nothing about it, and it does so in exactly the same words every time, so that the identification is consistent wherever the organisation’s news travels.

That reusability is the point and the risk. A journalist writing up a story at speed will often take the boilerplate as the organisation’s own account of itself and reuse it, lightly edited, as background. Whatever it says therefore tends to be republished, quoted and archived far beyond the life of any single announcement. A paragraph with that reach deserves to be written with the care usually reserved for the headline — and maintained with more, because it will still be introducing the organisation long after the story it accompanied is forgotten.

The Elements of a Sound Boilerplate

A sound boilerplate contains a short list of facts, in a predictable order. It opens with the organisation’s name in its correct form — the form it trades under, spelled and styled the way the organisation itself uses it. Next, what the organisation does, stated in plain terms a stranger can repeat: not its sector’s jargon for itself, but the sentence you would use to explain it to an intelligent person from outside the industry. Then the anchoring facts: where it is based, and when it was founded, where those are genuinely informative.

Scale comes next, and it is the element most often abused, so the discipline is strict: scale is stated only in plain, verifiable words. “Employs about 200 people across three sites” is a fact of the right kind. “A major player” is not a fact at all. If a number cannot be checked, or would embarrass the organisation when checked, it does not belong. The paragraph closes with the contact route — where media enquiries go — because a background paragraph that leaves the reader unable to follow up has failed at its simplest job. What is not on the list matters too: no awards shelf, no values, no slogans. Those have homes elsewhere in an organisation’s writing.

Writing One Honestly

The drafting standard for a boilerplate is higher than for the release it closes, because the boilerplate is a standing claim rather than a dated one. Apply one test to every sentence: could this survive, unedited, in front of a sceptical editor with a search engine? Superlatives fail that test by definition — “leading”, “premier”, “world-class” are assertions no reader can verify and every experienced reader discounts on sight. Market-leader claims fail it unless they are narrow, sourced and current. Inflated numbers fail it the moment anyone checks, and someone eventually checks.

Write in the third person, mostly in the present tense, in the plainest words the facts allow. Prefer the specific to the impressive: “repairs boilers across the north-west” tells a stranger more than “delivers innovative heating solutions”. Read the draft as a stranger: anything that needs explaining is jargon, and anything that sounds like it is trying to win an argument belongs in an advertisement, not here. The finished paragraph should read as if the organisation had nothing to prove — because in this paragraph it has not: identification is the whole task.

Length Discipline

A boilerplate is one paragraph, and the working convention is short — somewhere in the region of fifty to a hundred words. Treat that as guidance shaped by the paragraph’s job, not as a rule with an authority behind it: the job is identification, and identification past a certain point becomes biography. Within the convention, the budget is a useful discipline. It forces the choices that make a boilerplate good: which facts actually identify this organisation, and which are merely available.

Length fails in both directions. Too long, and the paragraph turns into a compressed company history that no journalist will lift and no reader will finish — background that needs its own background. Too short — a name, a slogan and a website — and the identification job is undone: the stranger still knows nothing. If a draft is running long, the excess is almost always in the same places: achievements, adjectives, and the second business line that did not need naming.

One Master, Carefully Kept Variants

There should be one master boilerplate, owned by a named person or team, from which every copy in circulation derives. That sounds bureaucratic until the alternative is seen in the wild: three departments issuing three versions, each slightly different, one of them two reorganisations out of date. Variants are legitimate — a trade-facing version may name the division that matters to trade readers, a regional version may lead with the local operation, a translated version serves another market — but a variant is a tailoring of the master, not a fresh composition.

The discipline that keeps variants honest is derivation. When the master changes, the variants are re-derived from it, in the same week, by the same hand — never edited separately into slow drift. Facts must agree across every version in circulation: the founding year, the headcount, the shape of the business. Two boilerplates that contradict each other do more damage than a dull one, because they tell the reader that the organisation does not know, or does not check, what it says about itself.

Placement and Formatting

Within the release, the boilerplate sits at the end of the document: after the body of the announcement — and after the call to action, where the release carries one — and before or alongside the contact details that close the page. It is set apart under its own short heading, conventionally “About” followed by the organisation’s name, so that a sub-editor can lift it whole or drop it whole without surgery. That separateness is functional, not decorative: the news must be usable by a reader who never reaches the boilerplate, and the boilerplate must be reusable by one who needs nothing else.

It should also be identical every time. A boilerplate that is rewritten per release is not a boilerplate but a recurring paragraph with an identity problem, and its small variations will quietly contradict each other across an archive. Where it sits inside the complete document — and how the whole release is assembled around it — is set out in this blog’s complete guide to formatting a press release; the boilerplate’s own requirements are the ones in this article.

Not a Mission Statement, Not an Advertisement

Two confusions account for most bad boilerplates. The first is the mission statement: an inward-facing text about purpose and values, written for staff and strategy documents. It speaks of what the organisation aspires to be. The boilerplate speaks of what the organisation is, for strangers, in facts. A sentence about being “committed to excellence” may have a life somewhere in the organisation’s writing; in the boilerplate it is dead weight, because it identifies nothing and can be — and is — pasted under any company in any industry.

The second confusion is the advertisement. Advertising persuades: it selects benefits, presses advantages, asks for a response. The boilerplate must do none of that work, because its credibility with journalists — the reason they lift it — rests on it being information rather than advocacy. Nor should the boilerplate migrate to the top of the document: the first paragraph of a release is for news, and an organisation that opens with its own biography has told the reader, before anything else, that it misunderstands what the document is for.

A Worked Example, Labelled as an Illustration

The company below is fictional, invented for this article, and the boilerplate is written to the standard set out above: facts only, each of them of a checkable kind, scale in plain words, no superlatives, and a length inside the conventional range.

About Alder & Vine — Alder & Vine is a family-owned preserves maker based in Ludlow, Shropshire. Founded in 1987, the company makes jams, chutneys and bottled sauces in small batches, supplying farm shops and independent grocers across the Midlands and Wales. It employs 34 people at its Ludlow production site. Media enquiries: via the press contact named at the end of each release.

Notice what the example does without effort: every sentence could be checked — a founding year, a place, a product list, a headcount of the unglamorous kind. Notice, too, what it declines to claim: the preserves are not award-winning, the company is not the region’s leading anything, and no sentence would embarrass it if a journalist printed it unchanged under a story the company would rather forget. That last property is the real test of the form.

Keeping It Current

A boilerplate decays on a predictable schedule, because organisations change faster than their standing text. The review triggers are events, not anniversaries: a change of chief executive or owner, a rebrand or rename, a merger, an acquisition or a disposal, an office move, a headcount that has grown or shrunk past the stated figure, a product line launched or retired. Any of these makes the existing paragraph, in some sentence, a falsehood — and a boilerplate containing a known falsehood is worse than none, because it was issued as the organisation’s settled account of itself.

Between triggers, keep a slow calendar habit: read the master once or twice a year against the organisation’s own website and recent releases, date the master text so anyone can tell at a glance which version is current, and retire old copies from templates and press kits, where stale text hides. A stale boilerplate is a credibility tell that journalists read fluently — the release announcing a dynamic new chapter, closed by a paragraph describing the company as it was three chapters ago. The inconsistency is noticed precisely because the boilerplate is the part of the document the reader trusts to have been checked.

Common Boilerplate Mistakes

The mistakes recur in a short list. Stuffing: the paragraph loaded with marketing claims, awards and aspirations until identification drowns — the commonest failure, and the one that teaches journalists to delete the paragraph unread. Staleness: facts that were true when written and are not true now, left in place because the paragraph is nobody’s job. Drift: variants and departmental copies contradicting each other on founding years, headcounts and even what the business does. And keyword stuffing — the boilerplate written for search engines, its sentences bent around phrases no human would choose. A boilerplate is an identification paragraph for readers; wording it for any other audience corrupts it exactly as surely as inflating its numbers does.

Two quieter mistakes complete the list. Length creep: the sentence added for this announcement that never gets removed, until the paragraph is a page. And the wrong name: the legal entity styled one way in the boilerplate and another way everywhere else, a small sloppiness that invites the reader to wonder what else was not checked. Every item on this list is cheap to avoid at drafting time and expensive to discover in print — which is the economics of the whole component.

The Paragraph That Outlives the Story

A boilerplate press release succeeds or fails, in the end, on this unglamorous paragraph. The story it accompanies will be forgotten by next quarter; the boilerplate will still be introducing the organisation, release after release, year after year, to readers meeting it for the first time. Write it once, write it honestly, keep it short, keep it current — and let every other paragraph in the document get on with the news.