{"id":7762,"date":"2021-05-14T09:17:42","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T13:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/?p=7762"},"modified":"2021-06-04T06:18:43","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T10:18:43","slug":"crypto-pr-good-bad-shonky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cointelegraph.com\/magazine\/2021\/05\/14\/crypto-pr-good-bad-shonky","title":{"rendered":"Crypto PR: The good, the bad and the shoddy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most crypto journalists, Will Foxley has a horror story about a bad encounter he had with a dodgy PR person.<\/b> The former tech reporter at CoinDesk recalls being embarrassed in his first few days on the job after he relied on bad information fed to him in an announcement.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI got burned by a bad PR agent within, like, two or three weeks on the job, where they gave me false press release information,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t quite verify it enough and then got called out by one of the higher industry people. That\u2019s like the quickest way to ruin your relationship with a journalist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s quick to add a disclaimer that \u201cthere are some great PR people out there,\u201d but he estimates the good guys only account for about 20% of the industry. The \u201clower 80%\u201d either don\u2019t care about, or don\u2019t understand the technology, or the fact journalists put their reputations on the line whenever they run a story.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey only have an interest in pumping whatever the coin they\u2019re tasked with pumping and getting whatever company they need into whatever headline, which is really unfortunate. And it leads to a lot of burnout among journalists, and a lot of frustration.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fortunately, the best crypto PR practitioners understand how to play the game and act accordingly. \u201cThe most important currency we have is trust,\u201d says David Wachsman, founder and CEO of the eponymous PR firm. \u201cWe have to earn that because the one thing I know for certain is reporters are a cynical bunch, and they know when something feels off.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a dangerous game to get wrong because PR agents and sometimes entire agencies can get blacklisted by publications or develop a bad reputation industry-wide, explains Foxley.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t like a PR person, you tell at least everyone that you\u2019re working with at your organization,\u201d says Foxley, who is now the editorial director at Compass Mining<\/a>. \u201cI saw that quite often. You\u2019re like, \u2018They\u2019re from that firm? Don\u2019t talk to them.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Emerging industry<\/h4>\n

The world of crypto PR is an emerging industry of specialist PR firms that are responsible for a large proportion of the crypto news out there. Co-founding president of the <\/span>Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers<\/span><\/a> Joon Ian Wong says that good PR agents play a much-needed role.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think PR people in any sector, including crypto, are an important part of the information landscape,\u201d he says. \u201cTheir job is to ensure that information flows easily and freely to the media.\u201d He adds: \u201cBut clearly they work for clients, so, you know, you can have issues with conflicts of interest.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Samantha Yap says PR agencies do a lot of work behind the scenes as the interface between crypto projects and journalists. \u201cHalf our time is literally educating our client on how the media works,\u201d she explains.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe spend a lot of time telling them: \u2018Oh, you can\u2019t put this promotional angle out because journalists are not going to write about it,\u2019 \u2018we\u2019ve got to take a more newsworthy angle,\u2019 or \u2018try to fit the story in the context of the wider industry.\u2019<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She continues: \u201cWhat the journalists see in their inbox is like two weeks of brainstorming work \u2014 at times it works, at times it doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Laundry list<\/h4>\n

Although Foxley is a big fan of Yap and calls her a \u201clegend,\u201d he has a laundry list of complaints about the vast majority of pitches he receives. But the biggest issue is that in a full-to-the-brim inbox, there are usually only a couple of useful leads among a sea of boring or irrelevant non-news.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo 80% is just dog trash,\u201d Foxley says. \u201cI\u2019ve just seen some horrendous pitches over my years at CoinDesk, and frankly, I don\u2019t quite understand why those pitches are made the way they are.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not helping themselves out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some pitches massively oversell the potential benefits of whatever unproven technology they\u2019re pumping, while others appear to have been bulk emailed to every journalist in the world. Many are unfamiliar with the fundamental requirements of journalism (which is that stories need to be newsworthy by being either important, unique or very interesting), but one common issue is a lack of technical understanding.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMore often than not, especially as a tech reporter, I saw PR pieces that didn\u2019t understand the tech that they were describing,\u201d he explains. \u201cYou get a PR guy or gal who doesn\u2019t exactly understand it, and they\u2019re trying to explain what a ZK-Rollup is. No, firstly, you don\u2019t know how to describe it, and this is the wrong context.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

PR news<\/h4>\n


\n<\/span>This isn\u2019t to say crypto journalists always cover themselves in glory either when they receive a newsworthy pitch. Yap sums up up the mission of PR agents simply and eloquently:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe sign and the skill of a good PR person is to pitch journalists the best possible angle in the way we want them to write it.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In an ideal world, of course, journalists would use a story pitch as the starting point, research the background, and speak with outside experts before producing a well-thought-out and balanced article that contributes to better understanding in the cryptosphere.<\/span><\/p>\n

What actually happens far too often is that press releases are given the barest rewrite before being uploaded.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are many reasons for this: low rates of pay on some crypto sites and a constant need to \u201cfeed the beast\u201d \u2014 i.e., the website \u2014 updated and new content. It leads to what is known as \u201cchurnalism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Foxley concedes that writing four or more news stories a day can be \u201cmind-melting,\u201d and it\u2019s \u201cvery easy just to lean on the press release and the story that\u2019s given to you. It\u2019s just fodder for the story. But it\u2019s not good for the industry; it\u2019s not good for readers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019m a fan of less stories per day from a news publication per day because I don\u2019t see another way of getting rid of that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Leslie Ankney has been on both sides of the fence, as a contributor to The Merkle and Forbes, a PR specialist at Ditto PR and communications lead at Anchorage Digital Bank. \u201cI\u2019m sure there are times when you\u2019re under deadline \u2014 it\u2019s probably tempting,\u201d she says, adding:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHopefully, as a reporter, you have insights and questions to follow up with, something that the press release didn\u2019t cover. But I understand that maybe if you have to turn out five pieces a day you may not have time.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wong says this is not a problem unique to crypto media. \u201cI think you see the same thing with a lot of finance reporting,\u201d he says. \u201cYou see the same thing with listed stocks, penny stocks, and so on. There\u2019s lots of blogs and publications out there that do the same thing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The ACJR aims to improve standards in crypto journalism, and Wong points out that the more well-resourced a crypto publication is, the more likely the staff has been conditioned to be wary of running any messages a PR person wants to convey:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBased on what I know of the reporters who work at some of these places […] they tend to be more skeptical and more critical about announcements and other notices put out by crypto PR folks, and because they work in crypto media, they are better equipped to actually cut through a lot of the marketing speak or the PR speak and get to the heart of the matter.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Foxley agrees that some journalists always view PR people with suspicion. \u201cI had some colleagues at CoinDesk that refused to interact with any PR people because they saw it necessarily tainting their work.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

How did we get here?<\/h4>\n

Wachsman is one of the biggest players in crypto PR, with 80 staff across offices in New York, Dublin and Singapore and clients including Cosmos, Hedera Hashgraph and NEM. The Financial Times recently <\/span>named<\/span><\/a> it one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the Americas.<\/span><\/p>\n

It traces its history back to when David Wachsman bumped into the CEO of Coinsetter in a bar in 2014. This led to Wachsman learning about Bitcoin and taking the exchange (later sold to Kraken) on as a client. He struck out on his own as a crypto specialist in 2015 and quickly signed up clients including Trezor, Slush Pool, Airbitz and the Coinsource Bitcoin ATM network.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wachsman wasn\u2019t the first crypto PR specialist. He credits Michael Terpin\u2019s Transform PR with that honor, but he says those two firms were pretty much the extent of the crypto PR industry at that time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t the wild west; it was non-existent,\u201d he recalls. \u201cMost of the time it was founders directly emailing reporters. They didn\u2019t know the right protocol. Sometimes, they weren\u2019t very informative; they didn\u2019t answer questions appropriately or in a timely fashion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n