When Not to Announce Anything

A · Plate 04 in the Notices series · Other Communications

Every organisation that publishes notices eventually publishes too many. The mechanism is not vanity; it is momentum. A channel exists, a rhythm establishes itself, and the rhythm starts to demand material. At that point the question shifts from whether something is worth announcing to what can be announced this week, and the two questions have very different answers.

The cost of an unnecessary notice is not the notice. It is the attention it spends, drawn from a fixed and shared account. Readers learn what a name's notices are worth, and they learn it from the average rather than the best. A publication record of eleven trivial notices and one important one teaches the audience to skim, and the important one is skimmed with the rest.

Four cases for silence

The first is the decision that has not been made. Announcing an intention to decide is an announcement about a process, and processes are interesting to the people inside them and to almost no one else. The decision will be news when it exists. Until then a notice manufactures an event out of a meeting.

The second is the change with no consequence beyond the organisation. Internal restructuring, tooling, reporting lines and naming are real work, and the people affected should hear about them properly and first. A public notice about them borrows the register of news for material that has no external reader, and the mismatch is audible.

The third is the recurring fact. An anniversary, a seasonal cycle, a milestone that was reached by arithmetic rather than by effort. These can be worth writing about at length, in an essay or a report where the interest lies in what is said about them. They rarely survive the compression of a notice, which has no room for the part that would have been interesting.

The fourth is the case where the announcement is a substitute for the action. This is the hardest one to see from inside, because the drafting feels like progress. The test is whether the notice would still be worth publishing if the work described in it were already complete and visible. If the answer is no, the notice is standing in for the work.

What to do instead

Most material that fails the notice test is not worthless; it is in the wrong form. A change with no external consequence belongs in a log or a release note that interested readers can subscribe to without it arriving uninvited. A process that will take months belongs in a page that is updated, where the history is visible and the reader can see the shape of the thing rather than a sequence of fragments.

The updated page is underused and deserves more attention than it gets. It respects the reader who arrives late, which is most readers, and it does not require them to reconstruct a story from six notices published over a year. It also disciplines the writer, because a page that contradicts its own earlier paragraphs is obvious in a way that a series of separate notices never is.

Keeping the account

A simple practice helps: keep a list of everything published as a notice over the last year, and read it in one sitting. The exercise is uncomfortable and clarifying. Patterns appear that no individual drafting decision revealed, and the proportion of the list that was worth a stranger's attention is usually lower than anyone expected.

The aim is not scarcity for its own sake. A name that publishes rarely and unhelpfully is worse than one that publishes often and well. The aim is that the decision to publish should be made by the same faculty that decides what is true, rather than by a calendar that has begun to make decisions on its own.