Last week we received an interesting press release from an Australian company named Coinjelly.
The press release talked about a Bitcoin wallet that was secured with an insurance policy and a guarantee and made some pretty awesome claims.
I had personally looked at running with the story that day and getting it out to the masses but something about it just didn’t quite feel right. Several other sites including CoinDesk, Forex Minute and others ran with the story while myself and other staff members debated if we would run the story.
Something about it just didn’t seem right. On the surface this was a great story and had we ran it initially we would have been first to the net with the story but our editorial policies and guidelines are that we run things we can report on as facts and the fact remained that we simply had a press release.
Journalism isn’t always about being first. You have to check your facts, and sometimes that means doing some legwork. On June 28th we wrote a story about CoinJelly but did not publish it because we had not yet acquired all of the facts to satisfy our strict editorial policies. Even if that meant not being the first.
I fired off an email to Zurich Financial Services Australia Limited to further confirm one of the claims made in the press release by CoinJelly. The statement in question was,
There have been a number of high profile security failures in decentralised internet currencies which have understandably slowed acceptance of Bitcoin. After getting caught up myself in one such failure, I could see the need to develop a software and security solution that was strong enough to be underwritten by Zurich Financial Services Australia, part of one of the world’s biggest insurers.
We continued to sit on the news and the piece for CoinJelly until we had some sort of confirmation while other sites began publishing full pieces regarding the company.
Last last evening I received a response from Michele (Chelke) Kennedy the head of communications at Zurich Financial Services Pty Ltd.
A CoinJelly press release stating that Zurich Financial Services in Australia is insuring CoinJelly products is erroneous. Our authorised general insurer in Australia, Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ABN 13 000 296 640) has not issued any policy of insurance to CoinJelly. Further, our non operating holding company, Zurich Financial Service Australia
Limited (ABN 11 008 423 372), has no business relationship with CoinJelly.