On this page12
- Why routine announcements get ignored
- The seven lenses
- The angle scoring grid
- Worked example: MANTRA Chain's $11M raise
- Other angles I've used, by lens
- When none of the seven lenses works
- Turning the angle into a pitch
- FAQ
- Can I use more than one angle in a single pitch?
- Should I pitch different angles to different outlets?
- How early should I work out the angle?
- What if my announcement is a token listing?
To find a news angle for a crypto announcement, stop asking what your company did and ask which bigger story it's evidence for. I run every routine update through seven lenses: regional, sector trend, data, people, contrarian, regulatory and first-of-kind. Then I keep the one or two that a reporter already covering that story would recognise and that I can prove in one sentence. The announcement stays the same. The angle decides whether anyone writes about it.
Most crypto news is routine: a raise, a mainnet, an integration, a listing, a partnership. Reporters see dozens of these a week. The ones that get written up are the ones that arrive already attached to something the reporter cares about.
Why routine announcements get ignored
A funding round on its own tells a reporter that money moved. That's a data point, not a story. The reporter has to do the work of figuring out why their readers should care, and with a full inbox, they won't.
An angle does that work for them. It answers "why this, why now, why my readers" before the reporter has to ask. I put it this way years ago, and I haven't found a better short version.
Cut the crap,nail the hook Shilika Jain on X, 22 Dec 2022
The seven lenses are simply seven places to look for that hook.
The seven lenses
1. Regional. Look at where this is happening and whether that place is a story right now. A raise led by investors in one region, a product built for one market, a team hiring in a city reporters are watching. Regional angles also open doors to local business media that would never cover a generic crypto raise.
Web3 funda: BUIDL local, promote global. Shilika Jain on X, 6 Dec 2022
2. Sector trend. Name the category your news belongs to and check whether a reporter is already tracking it. RWA, DePIN, AI agents, restaking, stablecoin payments. If your announcement is one more data point in a trend a reporter is writing about this month, you've given them a reason to include you. Getting the balance right matters, as I noted back in 2022.
It's important to find a balance between the market trends & how you'd like the users to perceive your project Shilika Jain on X, 23 Mar 2022
Ride the trend, but keep your own identity inside it.
3. Data. Look for a number nobody else has. Usage, a survey, an on-chain pattern, a cost comparison. A single strong stat can lead a headline. I've written separately about turning on-chain data into tier-1 coverage.
4. People. Find the person in this story worth writing about. A founder with an unusual path, a hire from a big institution, an investor with a public point of view. Profiles and interviews often come out of a people angle even when the news itself is small.
5. Contrarian. Check whether your news cuts against what most people in the space believe. If everyone says a category is a meme and your traction suggests otherwise, that tension is an angle. Use it carefully. Contrarian without evidence is just noise.
6. Regulatory. Connect the news to a law, a licence, a regulator's statement or a jurisdiction's new framework, if there's a real link. Reporters chase regulatory stories hard, because rules change what every company in a market can do. The link has to be real, though. A raise that happens to coincide with a new framework isn't a regulatory story unless the framework changes what you're building.
7. First-of-kind. Ask whether this is genuinely the first of something. First on a chain, first in a market, first to solve a specific problem at a specific layer. Be precise and be able to defend it. "First" claims are the ones reporters check hardest.
The angle scoring grid
Running an announcement through all seven usually produces three or four plausible angles. To pick, I score each one on three questions, 0 to 2 points each.
| Question | 0 points | 1 point | 2 points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proof: can I prove it in one sentence with a fact we can share? | No, it's a claim | Partly, with caveats | Yes, a named fact or number |
| Demand: is a specific reporter already covering this story? | I can't name one | I can name the beat | I can name the reporter and a recent piece |
| Fit: is it true to what the company actually does? | It's a stretch | Adjacent | It's the core of the business |
Anything scoring 5 or 6 is a lead angle. A 3 or 4 can be a supporting line in the pitch. Below 3, drop it, however clever it sounds.
The "fit" row is there for a reason. The fastest way to lose a reporter's trust is an angle that the company can't back up on a follow-up call.
Worked example: MANTRA Chain's $11M raise
In March 2024, MANTRA Chain was announcing an $11M raise for real-world asset tokenization. On paper, that's routine funding news. You can see how the campaign ran in the MANTRA Chain case study. Run back through the grid, the raise looks like this.
| Lens | What was there | Proof | Demand | Fit | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regional | Abu Dhabi-based lead investor, Middle East focus | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
| Sector trend | RWA tokenization, a category reporters were already covering | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
| People | CEO John Mullin with a clear view on tokenization | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
| Data | No proprietary dataset to lead with | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Regulatory | Middle East frameworks as context, not the news itself | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Contrarian | Nothing genuinely contrarian | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| First-of-kind | No defensible "first" | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
Two lenses scored 6, and they fit together: a Middle East story in a hot category. That's what the coverage reflected. CoinDesk's headline was "MANTRA Chain raises $11M for RWA tokenization with Middle East tint". The editor kept the regional frame right there in the headline. CryptoDaily UK and CryptoPotato followed, and the people angle, scoring 4, became a separate asset: a Cointelegraph interview with John Mullin titled "Everything tokenized", plus a Milk Road Daily feature.
Same raise. A wire release would have said "MANTRA Chain raises $11M". The angle said "money is flowing into tokenization from the Middle East, and here's who's building for it".
Other angles I've used, by lens
The same grid works on announcements far from funding. A few from my own client work, so you can see each lens in practice:
- Data: Tangem's self-custody survey had one headline stat, roughly two-thirds of crypto users supporting self-custody. That one number carried the story across English, Korean, Japanese and Dutch outlets.
- Regional plus data: Elastos commissioned research showing 67% of Nigerians trust Bitcoin for life savings over traditional methods, and it earned a standalone Cryptonews headline.
- First-of-kind: RARI Foundation's mainnet was framed around protecting NFT creator royalties at the chain level. One sharp angle took it into CoinDesk, The Block and Cointelegraph in the same week.
- Sector trend via news peg: For Fluence, the global Microsoft outage became the hook for a piece on why DePIN compute matters, which got an infrastructure story into e27, outside crypto media.
None of these needed a bigger announcement. They needed the announcement looked at differently.
When none of the seven lenses works
Sometimes you run the grid and nothing scores above 3. That's useful information, not a failure.
It usually means one of three things. The news is genuinely minor, and belongs on your blog and X rather than in a pitch. The news is fine but the timing is wrong, so hold it until it can be paired with something stronger, like a usage milestone or a partner's announcement. Or the company's story isn't clear enough yet, which is a positioning problem that no angle will fix.
Forcing an angle at that point costs more than it earns. A reporter who gets a stretched pitch from you once is slower to open the next one. If the bigger issue is that your updates don't connect to a story at all, my sibling piece on turning a product update into a story works on that layer.
Turning the angle into a pitch
Once you've picked the lead angle, it should show up in three places: the subject line, the first sentence of the pitch, and the first paragraph of the release. If those three say different things, the reporter will notice. My subject line formula goes through the first one in detail.
Then match the angle to the right reporter. A regional angle goes to the reporter covering that region's crypto activity, not to the general news desk. A regulatory angle goes to the policy reporter. That matching is most of the work on the Web3 PR campaigns I run, and it's why the same announcement can land in very different outlets depending on which lens leads.
FAQ
Can I use more than one angle in a single pitch?
Use one as the lead and, at most, one as support. MANTRA worked because regional and sector trend reinforced each other. Two unrelated angles in one pitch make it read like you're not sure what the story is.
Should I pitch different angles to different outlets?
Yes, as long as every angle is true and the facts are identical. A regional business outlet and a crypto trade outlet care about different things. Keep the numbers and quotes consistent across every version, or reporters comparing notes will catch it.
How early should I work out the angle?
Before the release is drafted and ideally before the announcement date is fixed. The angle sometimes changes the timing, for example holding a raise until a regulatory decision is public, so it's worth having a few weeks of room.
What if my announcement is a token listing?
Listings are among the hardest to angle because so many happen each week. Look hardest at the regional lens, especially where the exchange's home market is, and at the people lens. If neither scores well, treat the listing as owned-channel news.
Got a routine announcement coming up and no angle yet? Bring it to a 30-min session and we'll run it through the seven lenses together.
