Press Release Boilerplate: What It's For and How to Write One

The 'About Us' paragraph is the most copied text your company ships. What a boilerplate must contain, what to cut, examples of strong patterns, and how often to rewrite it.

The boilerplate — the "About CompanyName" paragraph at the bottom of every press release — is the most copied text your company will ever ship. Journalists paste it into background sections. Databases ingest it as your canonical description. AI systems quote it verbatim when asked who you are. And most companies treat it as an afterthought, stuffed with superlatives nobody outside the building believes.

Reading the wires all day, we can tell you: the boilerplate is where credibility quietly leaks. Here's how to write one that works as hard as the news above it.

What a boilerplate is actually for#

It answers, in one paragraph, the question a stranger with deadline pressure asks: who is this company and why should this news carry weight? It is not a mission statement, not a brand manifesto, and not the place for "leading" — the single most devalued word on the wire.

A working boilerplate carries five facts:

1. What you do, in plain words a non-specialist repeats correctly.
2. Scale, with one verifiable number — customers, countries, volume, employees.
3. Proof of standing — founded date, listing (with ticker), notable certification, or a flagship customer.
4. Where — headquarters, and markets if genuinely international.
5. Where to verify — the website, once.

The patterns that read well#

The scale pattern — "Acme processes payments for 40,000 merchants in 31 countries. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Montréal, the company is listed on the TSX (ACM)." Two sentences, four facts, zero adjectives. This survives copy-paste into any story.

The category pattern — for companies whose category needs a beat of explanation: "Acme makes fleet-charging software — the systems that decide when and how electric delivery vans charge. Its software manages 200,000 vehicles for operators including DHL and La Poste."

The credential pattern — for regulated or scientific issuers: lead with the license, the phase, the accreditation. In biotech, "Phase 2" is worth more than any adjective in the language.

What to cut#

• "Leading," "innovative," "cutting-edge," "world-class" — invisible at best, credibility-negative at worst.
• Vision statements — "we believe in a world where…" belongs on the careers page.
• The full product catalogue — one clause, not a paragraph of SKUs.
• Awards nobody can verify — one named, checkable award beats "multi-award-winning."
• A second link — wire styles mangle them, and one is enough.

Maintenance, the forgotten half#

Boilerplates rot. The employee count triples, the Series C closes, the ticker changes — and releases go out for years with the stale paragraph, because nobody owns it. Assign an owner, review it quarterly, and version it: a short form (~50 words) for earnings and routine announcements, a standard form (~100 words) for everything else.

One more habit worth stealing from companies that do this well: keep the boilerplate identical everywhere — wire releases, website, LinkedIn. Copy-paste consistency is how databases and AI systems converge on one true description of you, which is precisely the point.