Media is all around us, every day of our lives. From logos and advertisements to articles, social videos, etc., we are constantly presented with an endless pool of promotional, informational, and subliminal messaging.
Virtually anyone can add to the pool, but when it comes to professional messaging, the source has always been more refined.
Ancient Greeks had runners to deliver crucial reports. During the Middle Ages, kingdoms established Town Criers for important announcements.
Nowadays, businesses employ professionals and, in many cases, entire teams, dedicated to sculpting, sharing, and maintaining a stream of media to uphold brand identity. This holds true in the poker industry as well. And that’s where I come in.
I’ve had the unique experience of working for two of the largest poker operators in the world – the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and the World Poker Tour (WPT).
Humble Beginnings
My career began as a humble, summer intern at the 45th annual WSOP in 2014, among a group of nine other interns, some of which became lifelong friends. We were assigned a handful of responsibilities revolving around public/media relations.
This included tasks such as media check-in in which we would provide journalists with their designated media credential, uploading prize pool information to the website, and updating the online payout lists to indicate who has been knocked out of the tournament.
Another primary task, delegated to the night-shift crew, was manually entering the “End-of-Day” (EOD) chip count of every single surviving player from each WSOP bracelet event.
In subsequent years, I returned to the annual WSOP, then located at Rio Las Vegas, as the Night-Shift Media Supervisor, overseeing a similar set of interns I was once a part of.
The promoted role covered all the tasks mentioned above with a main emphasis and added steps to the EOD chip count process.
Once the counts for a given tournament were entered, I was charged with verifying that all the information was correct and generating sorted reports to post on WSOP.com, as well as distributing the reports to various poker news outlets so they could circulate the information to their respective audiences.
That is the generalized gist of internal media duties under a tournament poker operator:
Media personnel create media to share with external media personnel to create more media, all to ultimately be consumed and utilized by the poker community.
Joining the WPT
Later, in 2022, I was recruited by poker industry veteran Lance Bradley to join a newly established media department at WPT. Under Lance’s tutelage, I gained an immense amount of experience/knowledge about the worlds of journalism and media relations.
And under the corporate company style of WPT, I was exposed to a more structured approach to disseminating information.
WPT was fully equipped with multiple departments, Legal, Finance, Tour, Marketing, and more, all interconnected in certain ways. Many different types of announcements, stemming from different departments, were needed throughout the calendar year.
Processing and sending out these announcements via a press release was a fundamental responsibility of mine.
This would entail gathering all the relevant information to include in the release, writing out the information in an interest-catching and easy-to-digest way, and then plugging the release into a nicely formatted email distribution software to be dispersed to as many poker news websites as I could muster.
Whether the announcement was for scheduled events, meet-up games, new partnerships, etc., there were many steps in the process before the information could go public, including layers and layers of approval, which is quite tedious but a necessity when it comes to media.
One of the biggest cardinal sins in media and news is misinformation. So, these layers of approval, adding eyeballs each step of the way, help with the media’s accuracy. Avoiding misinformation to spread is crucial because an announcement, like a yo-yo that’s lost its momentum, is difficult to reel back in.
Besides ensuring that accurate information from the company is shared with the public, media departments also play a huge role in brand awareness.
A poker operators’ presence and ideals are spread through many media touch points, such as social media, editorial, website management, public and media relations.
Media is all around us, every day of our lives. Therefore, one thing is certain – No business should ever take their media department for granted.
