Gosh, I haven't really conducted a survey here or thought deeply about it, so this answer will be very off the cuff and not very 2024. Some of the examples that come to mind are the major media empires of, e.g. Brene Brown or Gretchen Rubin. 

Yes.

Rob Bensinger has tweeted about it some.

Overall we continue to be pretty weak in on the "wave" side, having people comment publicly on current events / take part in discourse, and the people we hired recently are less interested in that and more interested in producing the durable content. We'll need to work on it.

Oh, yeah, to be clear I completely made up the "rock / wave" metaphor. But the general model itself is pretty common I think; I'm not claiming to be inventing totally new ways of spreading a message, quite the opposite.

Yup to all of that. :)

Your curiosity and questions are valid but I'd prefer not to give you more than I already have, sorry.

What are the artifacts you're most excited about, and what's your rough prediction about when they will be ready?

Due to bugs in human psychology, we are more likely to succeed in our big projects if we don't yet state publicly what we're going to do by when. Sorry. I did provide some hints in the main post (website, book, online reference).

how do you plan to assess the success/failure of your projects? Are there any concrete metrics you're hoping to achieve? What does a "really good outcome" for MIRI's comms team look like by the end of the year,

The only concrete metric that really matters is "do we survive" but you are probably interested some intermediate performance indicators. :-P

The main things I am looking for within 2024 are not as SMART-goal shaped as you are probably asking for. What I'd like to see is that that we've developed enough trust in our most recent new hires that they are freely able to write on behalf of MIRI without getting important things wrong, such that we're no longer bottlenecked on a few key people within MIRI; that we're producing high-quality content at a much faster clip; that we have the capacity to handle many more of the press inquiries we receive rather than turning most of them down; that we're better positioned to participate in the 'wave' shaped current event conversations.

I'd like to see strong and growing engagement with the new website.

And probably most importantly, when others in our network engage in policy conversations, I'd like to hear reports back that our materials were useful.

what does a "we have failed and need to substantially rethink our approach, speed, or personnel" outcome look like?

Failure looks like: still bottlenecked on specific people, still drowning in high-quality press requests that we can't fulfill even though we'd like to, haven't produced anything, book project stuck in a quagmire, new website somehow worse than the old one / gets no traffic, etc.

In this reply I am speaking just about the comms team and not about other parts of MIRI or other organizations.

We want to produce materials that are suitable and persuasive for the audiences I named. (And by persuasive, I don't mean anything manipulative or dirty; I just mean using valid arguments that address the points that are most interesting / concerning to our audience in a compelling fashion.)

So there are two parts here: creating high quality materials, and delivering them to that audience.

First, creating high quality materials. Some of this is down to just doing a good job in general: making the right arguments in the right order using good writing and pedagogical technique; none of this is very audience specific. There is also an audience-specific component, and to do well on that, we do need to understand our audience better. We are working to recruit beta readers from appropriate audience pools.

Second, delivering them to those audiences. There are several approaches here, most of which will not be executed by the comms team directly, we hand off to others. Within comms, we do want to see good reach and engagement with intelligent general audiences.

We think that most people who see political speech know it to be political speech and automatically discount it. We hope that speaking in a different way will cut through these filters.

At the start of 2024, the comms team was only me and Rob. We hired Harlan in Q1 and Joe and Mitch are only full time as of this week. Hiring was extremely labor-intensive and time consuming. As such, we haven't kicked into gear yet.

The main publicly-visible artifact we've produced so far is the MIRI newsletter; that comes out monthly.

Most of the rest of the object-level work is not public yet; the artifacts we're producing are very big and we want to get them right.