Coinbase CEO reveals the best way of addressing the community

Brian Armstrong, the CEO Coinbase exchange recently said that company leaders are massively starting to completely avoid mainstream journalists. More and more corporate executives found that speaking to their audiences directly via blog posts is much better than trusting mainstream media to spread their words.

Audiences are on social media and podcasts, not mainstream media

In a tweet published earlier today, May 22nd, Armstrong said that “Our customers are on YouTube/podcasts/social media — not reading mainstream media.”

He said that this is a growing trend that he noticed, and it is happening for two reasons. One of them is that consumers do not read mainstream media, while the other is that companies can control their own distribution channels.

This way, the companies can say what they want to say, and not only get a single quote per article, which often ends up being openly mean.

Of course, Armstrong did not mean to generalize, and he added that there are high-quality journalists out there. He also admitted that journalism fulfils a major role in modern society. But, he still believes that the best way for firms and their executives to go about the situation is to write their own blog posts and publish their own videos. In addition to that, they should build a relationship with 3-5 respected traditional journalists.

He noted that “Going on a national TV program might drive (literally) 100 visitors to your website. Getting on the front page of Hacker News will drive 10k+ visitors.“

In other words, he still believes in specialist reports.

What do the other CEO’s think?

Armstrong is not the only one who still has faith in journalism, either. Many others responded to his tweet, leaving their own thoughts on the matter.

One example is the CEO of Binance.US, Catherine Coley. Coley said she believes in the press and its importance. Of course, she acknowledged the ability to speak to the users directly.

However, she believes that it is important to tell stories through ‘amazing storytellers’ in order to advance the industry.

Jesse Powell, the co-founder of Kraken, stated that the partial problem today is that media always looks for a ‘sensational “gotcha” angle,’ and repeats words out of context, which can be misleading.

The chief executive of Chainstone Labs, Bruce Fenton, also had a comment. He said that it is “Hard to believe that only 15 years ago people would pay PR firms thousands to get them quoted in Time or Forbes so they could then frame the article & hang it on the wall.”