A press release boilerplate is five sentences: what the company is, what it does and for whom, one checkable proof point, where it operates, and where to go next. Write those five, put them under an “About [Company]” heading at the bottom of the release, and stop writing.
That answer disappoints people. They came looking for a formula that would let them fit the vision statement, the founding story, the three pillars, the awards, and the diversity commitment into a paragraph a reporter would read. No such formula exists, because no reporter reads that paragraph. They read the first sentence, decide whether they can use it, and move on.
The good news is that the five-sentence version does more work than the long one. It gets pasted into stories verbatim. It gets picked up by the wire aggregators. It becomes the description that follows your company around for years, which is a bigger deal now than it was five years ago, and I will get to why.
The five lines, in order
Line one is the definitional sentence and it carries most of the weight. Legal name, category noun, and the specific thing you do, in that order. “Northgate Analytics is a supply chain forecasting platform for mid-market food and beverage manufacturers.” Notice what is absent. No adjectives. No “leading.” No “innovative.” A category noun that a stranger could look up, and an audience specific enough to exclude most companies.
The single most common failure in this line is a category noun that does not exist outside your marketing meetings. If you call yourself a “revenue intelligence orchestration layer,” a reporter has to translate before they can use the sentence, and translation is friction. Friction is why the sentence gets rewritten or dropped.
Line two states the mechanism. How does the thing work, in plain language, in one sentence. “The platform ingests distributor point-of-sale data and produces weekly demand forecasts at the SKU and region level.” A reader who knew nothing about you now understands the product well enough to describe it to someone else. That is the test.
Line three is the proof point, and it must be a number or a name you can defend in writing. Customer count, years in operation, units shipped, assets under management, named marquee clients you have permission to name, a certification from a body that issues certifications. “Founded in 2017, Northgate serves 140 manufacturers across North America.” One number is stronger than three, because three reads as padding and the reporter cuts to one anyway.
If you have no defensible number, use a defensible fact instead. Headquarters and founding year are facts. “Passionate about transforming the industry” is not a fact and every editor who has worked a desk for more than a month reads it as noise.
Line four is scope and location. Where you are based, where you operate, how many people if the number helps you. This line matters more than founders think because it is what makes you findable and disambiguable. There are four companies with your name. Only one of them is in Portland with sixty employees.
Line five is the pointer: website URL, and where to go for media inquiries if that is not covered elsewhere in the release. Plain URL, no tracking parameters, no shortener. Wire services and news aggregators handle a bare URL cleanly and mangle everything else.
Read the five back in order. If it sounds dry, you have it right. Boilerplate that sounds exciting is boilerplate that got cut.
Two structural notes on the block itself. Head it with “About [Legal Company Name]” as a bolded line, using the legal name in full at least once, then the short name everywhere after. And place it at the bottom of the release, above the media contact block and above the three hash marks that signal the end of the release, which is a wire-service convention old enough that editors read it without thinking.
A version test worth running before you commit. Hand the five sentences to somebody in your company who does not work in marketing, and ask them to describe the business back to you from memory a minute later. If they can, the block works. If they hesitate or reach for the vision language, line one is not doing its job, and no amount of polish on lines two through five will rescue it.
Boilerplate is a printing term, and that history explains the job
The word comes from 19th-century American newspaper production. Syndicates distributed ready-to-print content to small papers as solid metal printing plates rather than as loose type, and those plates resembled the steel plate used in boiler construction. A small-town editor could drop the plate into the forme and print it without setting a single letter. The content was unchangeable by design, which was the entire point.
That history is not trivia. It tells you what the format is for. Boilerplate is content designed to be reused without editing, by someone who has neither the time nor the inclination to rewrite it. Every decision about a press release boilerplate follows from that constraint.
It means the block has to be self-contained, because it will be lifted out of context and dropped somewhere else. No pronouns referring back to the body of the release. No “as mentioned above.” No dependence on the headline for meaning. Someone reading only your boilerplate should understand who you are.
It means the block has to be accurate without maintenance, because it will outlive the release. A boilerplate saying “the fastest growing company in the sector” ages into an embarrassment. A boilerplate saying “founded in 2017” stays true.
And it means the block should be identical every single time. Consistency is not laziness here, it is the mechanism. A reporter who has seen the same sentence in six of your releases starts to internalize the category you claim. Change it every quarter and you have taught nobody anything.
There is a modern extension of that same logic. Wire distribution puts your release on dozens of syndicated pages, and those pages get indexed, aggregated, and increasingly used as source material by systems that summarize companies on demand. Your boilerplate is often the most repeated description of your business anywhere on the open web, appearing identically across many independent domains. Repetition across independent sources is exactly what a machine uses to decide what a company is. Write the sentence you want repeated back to you, then repeat it without variation.
The mistakes that make editors delete the whole block
The mission statement opener. “At Northgate, we believe that supply chains should work for everyone.” Nobody has ever used this sentence in a story. It answers a question no reporter asked and it pushes the definitional sentence into position two where it may not survive the cut.
Superlatives without a source. Leading, premier, top-rated, best-in-class, world-class, award-winning. Each one requires the reporter to either verify it or attribute it to you, and attribution costs them a clause. Most will delete it. If you have a ranking, name the ranking and the year: “ranked among the top ten by [named publication] in 2025” is usable because the reporter can check it in thirty seconds.
Three paragraphs where one belongs. I still see boilerplate blocks running 250 words with subheadings. The reporter’s eye stops at the end of the first paragraph. Everything after that is writing you did for yourself.
Jargon stacking. “An AI-native, API-first, vertically integrated platform.” Every adjective in that chain reduces the odds the sentence survives, because each one is a term the reporter would need to explain to their readers.
Inconsistency across your own properties. Your press release boilerplate says one thing, your LinkedIn About says another, your homepage says a third, and your Crunchbase profile still describes the product you sunset in 2023. Reporters check. So does everything else that reads about you. Pick the five sentences, then push them into every profile you control on the same afternoon.
Stale numbers left to rot. A boilerplate claiming 140 customers eighteen months after you passed 400 is a signal that nobody owns this paragraph. Worse, when a reporter checks the number against a more recent source and finds a mismatch, the credibility hit lands on everything else in the release. Put a calendar reminder on the proof-point sentence and review it every two quarters.
Legal names that do not match your legal entity. If the company is registered as Northgate Analytics, Inc. and the boilerplate says Northgate Analytics Group, you have created a second entity in every database that ingests the release. Use the registered name once in the About heading, then the short form. Small point, long consequences.
Contact information buried inside the block. Media contact belongs in its own labeled section, with a human name, a direct email, and a phone number that a person answers. A generic press@ address that routes to a shared inbox nobody monitors has killed more coverage than bad writing ever did.
Where the boilerplate goes to work after the release
The block does not stop working when the news cycle ends, and this is the part most teams never account for.
It becomes your syndication description. Every wire pickup carries it. Search a company name and you will often find the same paragraph on ten aggregator domains, word for word. That repetition is the single cheapest way to establish a consistent description of your company across independent sources.
It becomes the reporter’s shortcut on the next story. A journalist writing about your category six months from now needs one sentence to describe you. If your boilerplate gave them a clean one, they use it. If it did not, they write their own, and their version is the one that gets copied by the next three writers who cover the story.
It becomes the seed for your other properties. The five sentences should be the source text for your website About page, your LinkedIn company description, your directory listings, your conference speaker bios, and your Organization schema markup. Not adapted. Copied. Every variation you introduce splits the signal.
And it becomes the answer when someone asks a machine what your company does. Systems that summarize companies pull from the descriptions they can find, and they weight descriptions that agree with each other across sources. If your press release boilerplate, your LinkedIn, your homepage, and your Crunchbase entry all contain the same definitional sentence, that sentence is what comes back.
Write the five lines this week, paste them into every property you own, and the description will keep working long after the announcement stops.