Why Bad News Needs a Different Strategy to Good News — and Most Organisations Have Them Backwards

Kitchen Sinking means releasing all bad news simultaneously to remove the oxygen from the drip. Good news should be staged across time to create multiple peaks. Most organisations do both the wrong way round, turning a difficult story into a long one and a good announcement into a single news cycle.

I watched a client manage a difficult industry story last year by releasing one detail at a time across six weeks. The logic was understandable: each disclosure was controlled, measured, framed with care. The communications team had put a lot of thought into it.

By week three, the story was no longer about the original issue. It was about the management of the story. Every new disclosure became its own news cycle. Journalists who had moved on came back. The narrative accumulated a life it would never have had if everything had come out in week one.

A crisis comms colleague I spoke to about it used three words: "They should have kitchen-sinked."

What Kitchen Sinking means

The concept comes from Compelling Communication, and the image is the right one. When you kitchen-sink a difficult disclosure, you put everything in at once. Every known negative detail, in a single statement, complete and sourced. You leave nothing for someone else to find later. You remove the drip.

A drip of negative information is worse than the original disclosure in almost every case. The original story has a natural lifespan. Each new detail restarts it. By the time the last piece comes out, the audience has spent weeks in the story and the total coverage far exceeds what a single complete disclosure would have generated.

There's a secondary problem. When information emerges in stages, the implicit message is that the organisation is managing what people know rather than telling them what happened. The story shifts from "this difficult thing occurred" to "we are being told information in controlled portions." Audiences pick up on that framing even when they can't articulate it. Trust erodes in proportion to the perceived management.

A single difficult story lasts a news cycle. A drip of difficult stories lasts until you run out of details to leak.

Kitchen Sinking feels counterintuitive because the instinct in a crisis is to control. Release only what you must. Buy time. Manage the narrative. Those instincts are understandable and they are, in most cases, exactly wrong. Control achieved by withholding information is borrowed time. The bill always comes due.

The opposite rule for good news

The same principle inverted explains why most good news announcements underperform.

A major product launch, a significant partnership, a funding round, an industry award. The instinct is to announce everything at once, in a single press release, with all the supporting detail. One complete statement covering everything the organisation wants the world to know.

One statement, one news cycle, then silence. The momentum peaks and drops. Three days later, nobody is talking about it.

The staged approach treats each element of a good story as its own announcement. The partnership announcement comes first. Two weeks later, the first client case study. A month after that, the product update enabled by the partnership. Each piece creates a new moment of coverage. The audience encounters the story multiple times, from multiple angles, over an extended period.

Release bad news all at once. Release good news in stages. Most organisations do both the wrong way round.

The compound effect is significant. Multiple coverage moments build familiarity. A reader who encounters the same company three times across six weeks has a different relationship with that brand than a reader who saw one announcement and moved on. The staged release turns a single story into a sustained presence.

Why the instincts get reversed

The reversal happens for the same reason in both cases: the desire to control the experience the audience has.

With bad news, control feels like releasing information slowly. With good news, control feels like presenting everything at once in a single polished package. Both instincts optimise for the organisation's comfort rather than the audience's attention.

Bad news handled in stages keeps the organisation in control of the release schedule while handing control of the narrative to whoever is covering it. Good news released all at once keeps the organisation in control of the message while handing control of the audience's attention to whatever comes next in their feed.

The communications decisions that work are the ones that account for how audiences actually process information over time, not how organisations would prefer them to. Audiences don't read a crisis and conclude it's over. They notice whether new details keep appearing. Audiences don't see a complete announcement and think "I now have the full picture." They see one story, move on, and come back if prompted.

The practical rule

Before any significant communication, the question is: does the audience need to trust us at the end of this, or do they need to be interested?

Trust requires completeness. If you're asking an audience to trust you through a difficult moment, incomplete disclosure undermines the thing you're trying to build. The pain of a full disclosure on day one is real and short. The pain of managed disclosure across weeks is cumulative and destroys the credibility you're trying to preserve.

Interest requires spacing. If you want an audience to remain engaged with a good story, you have to give them reasons to come back. A single announcement is a closed door. A staged campaign leaves the next door open at each step.

The crisis comms colleague who mentioned Kitchen Sinking to me said the client would have spent the same six weeks being talked about. The only difference was whether they were talked about for the original issue or for the way they handled it. One of those is survivable. The other follows you.