Just a quick proposal, but what about setting up some sort of RSS feed containing release announcements? Quite a few vendors do this sort of thing for update and patch notifications, and I'm thinking that since we want to encourage people to keep up-to-date, it might well be a good idea to have an additional means of obtaining notifications.
On the other hand, would this be too much of an upkeep overhead, since the release manager has to update about a billion templates on MediaWiki.org, and send notifications to three or four (perhaps more) different lists when he releases a new version at present.
Perhaps a lot more of it could be automated. ;)
Rob Church