An interesting (IMHO) historical tidbit:
Way back in the good old days, when Unix and it's contemporaries were actually used as mainframe-class multiuser timesharing systems, a facility to inform users of news and updates was a basic necessity, rather than these days, where it has apparently degenerated into another revenue source, used for spamming you with advertisements delivered through ill-conceived MOTDaaS (MOTD-as-a-Service) channels.
It seems the first system to have a standard and well-thought-out MOTD system shipped by default, was, of course, Multics - the ancestor of most good ideas in use today. Here is the info page for the print_motd facility:
:Info: print_motd: pmotd: 03/17/87 print_motd, pmotd
Syntax as a command: pmotd {control arguments}