Why "announcing" something isn't an announcement

We need to stop conflating information dissemination with communicative intent and distinguish between a broadcast event, a public declaration, and what this board actually calls announcements -- which requires not just publicity but also specificity of audience and expectation of engagement.

True -- people say they announced it, but nobody was told.

The problem with your premise is that it assumes "announcement" has a stable denotation, which it doesn't. If we define announcement as any statement conveying new information to a relevant audience, then every Wikipedia edit is an announcement. If we define it as a deliberate act of making something known, then the distinction between announcing and merely stating disappears entirely — both are volitional acts with communicative intent.

You keep trying to build this dichotomy where "announcing" implies some performative publicity apparatus (press release, public statement, ceremony) while not-announcing is just transmission. But that's a category error on my part too. I should probably stop.