The hardest part of my job isn’t producing more. It’s deciding what deserves attention.
Most companies don’t have an ideas problem. Product updates, customer wins, research, events, partnerships, milestones. On any given week, there’s more that could be published than should be.
That’s where communications earns its keep. Not as a content factory, but as an editorial filter.
The questions
Four of them, and I come back to them constantly:
- Does this change how a customer, a reporter, or an investor thinks about us? Plenty of news is true and still changes nothing. If the reader finishes the story holding the same opinion they started with, the story didn’t do any work.
- Does it move a conversation the business actually cares about? Every company has two or three arguments it needs to win in the market. Publishing that doesn’t advance one of them is effort spent away from the goal, even when it performs well.
- Is there a point of view here, or are we publishing because something happened? Announcements without an argument are the easiest thing in the world to produce and the easiest thing for a reader to skip.
- And the one that matters more every month: can we prove it? A claim without evidence behind it now costs you more than silence would have. Anyone can generate a confident paragraph in seconds. What’s scarce is the number, the customer willing to go on record, the research you actually ran. Proof is the part that can’t be faked at volume, which is exactly why it’s becoming the whole game.
Most stories aren’t bad. But they are when aimed at the wrong room.
The filter question I’ve added recently is who this is for, and where it should live.
A lot of what gets pitched internally as an “announcement” is real work that matters to a specific group of people. Corporate instinct is to treat a press release as the default container, because that’s the most visible thing communications owns. But a story built for forty customers doesn’t get better by being aimed at forty thousand strangers. It gets thinner.
The same piece of news can be a wire release, a customer email, a partner briefing, a sales enablement one-pager, an executive’s LinkedIn post, or a conversation with one reporter who covers that exact beat. Those aren’t tiers of importance. They’re different rooms with different people in them, and the work is matching the story to the room.
Getting that match right does something useful internally, too. When the answer to “should we announce this?” is “no, but here’s a better route,” you’re not killing someone’s work. You’re routing it.
The judgment is the easy part
Deciding what deserves attention takes about ten minutes. Explaining the decision to the person whose project didn’t make the calendar takes considerably longer, and that’s the part of the job nobody writes posts about.
A few things I’ve found that help.
- Say no with a reason attached to the audience, not to your own taste.
- Offer the alternative route in the same breath.
- Make the standard public inside the company, so the filter reads as a shared bar rather than one person’s preference.
That last one matters most. If teams understand what clears the bar, they start pre-filtering their own requests, and the volume problem shrinks on its own. If they don’t, communications become a queue with a gatekeeper, and people learn to route around it.
What I’ve learned
Saying less isn’t the goal. Making what you say land is.
The teams I’ve watched do this well aren’t the ones with the biggest calendars. They’re the ones where a company announcement still means something because the bar for becoming one is understood and enforced.
I’ve been on the newsroom side of this too, where the filter is brutal, and the feedback is instant: the story runs, or it doesn’t. In-house, the filter has to be built deliberately, because nothing external forces it on you.
And frankly, it’s something I keep learning. Some weeks I get the call right. Some weeks I publish something that clears three of the four questions and hope the fourth doesn’t matter. It usually does!
