KEY POINTS

• Boilerplate is recurring material inserted into stories extending longer than a single day to remind readers of prior context. It is a special type of “background” information.

• Boilerplate follows constraints on content and placement within a news text. Its discourse purpose is orientational, orienting the public to the status of a story to date.

• Key injunctions of newswriting are manifested in this seemingly throwaway material (often recycled wholesale from previous stories): to simplify, to maintain an authorial distance, and to summarize previously reported details of a story when reporting it afresh.

• Boilerplate is repetitious, unattributed, identifies and describes, summarizes, and is potentially expendable as text. Nonetheless, despite its “shorthand” language and a text design resulting from the pragmatic requirements of well-formed news discourse, its role in framing a news story may also end up influencing public debate.

A good news story is more than just scandal, victory, upset, or a tale of woe or triumph. A good news story is also marked by how artfully it is compiled, by the extent to which the reporter manages the injunctions and conventions of newswriting. Well-formed news discourse – the kind found in stories that would be considered well-reported and well-written by news practitioners themselves – is structured by a fairly strict set of rules that the reporter follows and acts on (as was articulated in Chapter 7).