It's important to have a regularly updated presence here to promote the project. I know I'm not inclined to spend a lot of time going to a bunch of different forums and sites to follow each project, especially when the project specific forums use irritating, oddball forum software which is a lot different from SMF. Bitshares has a nice forum with Simple Machines, but I don't even check in there too often.

The newsletters are a good idea if not sent more than once a week. It makes it easier to keep up if the news is delivered via email.

Some projects try to deliver updates via Bitmessage, but it doesn't work at all well when the news disappears if you don't run the client within a couple of days of it being sent.