The Tyranny of the Good Press Release

We have all, collectively, learned to write the press release before we have written the policy. The press release is, in many cases, excellent. The headline lands. The dek is crisp. The bullet points have the texture of authority. The opening quote is from the right person, with the right level of seniority, in a sentence that sounds, on the page, like the kind of sentence a serious official would actually utter, even when the official in question would, in private conversation, struggle to remember the substantive policy the sentence was attached to.

The policy is, increasingly, an afterthought. This is, in my view, a problem worth naming.

Where the imbalance came from

It came from the regional discovery, over the past two cycles, that a well-produced press release is read by more people, in more places, with more attention, than the substantive policy document the release was supposed to summarise. Once that discovery landed, the operational consequence was inevitable. The policy class started to allocate more time to the release and less to the document. The communications team gained seniority. The substantive team kept the same head count. The eventual published output reflected the reallocation, which is to say it got better at announcement and quieter at follow-through.

This is not, in itself, a moral failure. It is a perfectly rational response to a media environment that rewards the announcement and ignores the implementation. The regional policy class adapted to the incentives the media environment created. The cost of the adaptation is, however, large and worth being honest about.

What the cost actually looks like

The cost looks like a steady stream of beautifully announced programmes whose subsequent reporting cycles produce thinner and thinner substantive updates, until the eventual quiet abandonment of the programme can be done without a corresponding announcement, because the media that received the original announcement has, by then, moved on. The programme leaves a press release in the archive and very little else. The policy class moves on to the next announcement. The cycle repeats.

Meanwhile, the programmes that do quietly deliver their implementations are, in this configuration, systematically under-covered. Their delivery does not produce announcements. Their follow-through does not generate news cycles. The press, accordingly, does not cover them, and the broader policy conversation loses sight of what is actually working in favour of what is being announced.

What a healthier configuration would look like

A healthier configuration would require the policy class to spend at least as much time on the implementation as on the announcement. It would require the press to learn to cover the boring follow-through with the same seriousness it currently brings to the launch. It would require the public to develop, slowly, the kind of literacy that distinguishes between a programme that has shipped and a programme that has only been announced. None of these adjustments is, on its own, hard. All of them cut against the incentives the current configuration rewards.

I am not, in this column, proposing a solution. I am proposing that we, in this region, name the imbalance honestly. We are very good at writing press releases. We are getting less good at the policy work the press releases purport to describe. The first step toward correcting that is to stop treating the press release as the measure of the policy. The policy is, in the end, the only measure that matters. The release is the lobby. The work is the building. We have, for two cycles, been spending too much of our institutional energy on the lobby. The building deserves more.