If you’ve ever wondered how crypto gets translated into something people can understand and trust, David Sencil is the answer. He’s the guy in the middle (half way between builder and storyteller), who gets engineers, editors, and everyday readers to speak the same language. The American has been operating at that intersection of production and media since December 2021.
“It was a migration, not a pivot”. This might sound like a teenager saying to their parents that’s how they are, that is not a phase, but this time is for real. Sencil, in the beginning of his career, saw code as the craft and stories as the byproduct. However, that changed once he began collaborating with editorial teams. “I quickly realize that the story is a product. Crypto made it even more obvious for me. That’s why I changed my career and started as a Product Media Manager”, he explains.
The role of a product media manager, according to Sencil, can be broken down into three tracks:
● Product: he works on tools that help editorial teams capture data, manage workflows and ship stories faster.
● Media: he helps shape packaging: headlines, explainers, visuals, and formats that meet readers where they are. It’s another way to help the reader to know where to pay attention.
● Bridgework: engineers want clean requirements; editors want clarity; readers want context. He makes sure none of these threads snap under deadline pressure.
“I don’t own the news, but I own the surfaces where news happens,” he summarises. If journalism is the engine, he’s building the chassis so it runs at speed without issues.
Sencil explains that a typical week has him splitting time between in different things:
● Roadmapping with engineers. “That’s the only way to keep ingestion pipelines sturdy and analytics honest.”
● Sitting with editors. “I need to understand where context gets lost, where repeat explanations could be templatized, where readers drop off.”
● Packaging experiments. “We, with the team, tweak how explainers are stacked, test the order of blocks, tighten scannability.”
● Reader feedback loops. “Obviously, we have to read comments carefully, as the users are great at picking up problems, but not proposing solutions.”
If you check Sencil profiles in different websites, you’ll see he’s not interested in crypto cosplay. You won’t see annoying memes, no laser eyes, no doomposting. He tries to keep his head straight and treat it like infrastructure. If a reader can’t figure out what a protocol does in three sentences, the story failed. If a chart doesn’t answer a question, it’s decoration.
Even if he thinks like that, he can’t avoid being tempted to fall in the clickbait trend to farm some extra clicks. “Some spicy and misleading headlines might increase traffic for a while… but I think, in the long run, we’ll lose the trust and attention from our readers. And that’s the best metric we can have,” he argues.
Sencil started this new role in a difficult time to enter a crypto outlet. He was in the middle of a bear market, when there were rumors flying around, and too many people wondering what was next for the crypto market in general, and Bitcoin in particular. “It was a difficult time,” he remembers, “there was a lot of noise, and it was difficult to find verifiable sources. But we ended up with a lesson: readers want a map, they want an explanation, not a vibe.”
Nowadays, academics are pushing for an informal, understandable style for anyone. Jargon can have a free pass if it’s unavoidable, or in a niche outlet, but for the general public it should be defined. And Sencil agrees with this. “Editors should speak like smart friends in a bar, they should be specific, curious, they can be funny sometimes, but they must be clear. And absolutely no cult-of-personality takes. They must never, ever be the news,” he argues.
He keeps a professional footprint online, focused, not loud. Public bylines and product notes are the receipts; social is the service lane. He uses platforms like X to track sentiment drift and emerging narratives, but he’s careful not to chase clout. The goal is to understand the conversation, not dominate it. He’d rather ship a clean explainer than farm retweets about the latest ticker drama.
