🌊 5 Lessons from 5 Years of RocaNews

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By Billy Carney, Max Frost, and Max Towey

Five years ago yesterday, we huddled around a computer, pressed publish…and nothing happened.

Thus began RocaNews.

We three founders – Billy Carney, Max Frost, and Max Towey – had the idea for Roca four months prior, in April 2020. At the time, we were locked in our parents’ homes with little to do as the pandemic was sending media partisanship and fearmongering into overdrive. First, we complained about it; then we decided to do something about it. That August, we quit our jobs and bet it all on Roca.

In the lead-up, we returned to our apartments in Washington, DC, and began working 100-hour weeks, trading our sleep for time spent designing websites, trying to line up podcast guests, and discussing what the next-generation news outlet would look like. On August 25, 2020, we rolled the dice, launching an Instagram page, podcast, newsletter, and website.

And the bet flopped. 

In our minds, we were doing something big: Launching a media company! Coming after Big News! In everyone else’s, we were three dudes in an apartment running a blog. After going live, our only website visitors were friends and family, plus some former colleagues who emailed to predict that we would fail. And for the first four months, it looked like we would. 

Day after day, we woke up and drafted news stories, Instagram posts, and newsletters for an audience of perhaps 20 people. After three months, the constant self-doubt and sleep deprivation were taking a significant toll on our mental health. Yet while failure felt terrible, our belief in our mission – delivering the news without bias or fear – didn’t waver. But how to achieve it? 

Little did we know, we had already started to turn the corner. That October, we had posted our first set of “QuickCards,” a bullet-point news rundown for Instagram. While the like count stayed low – we went from maybe two to ten likes per post – for the first time, we started hearing from friends that they were actually getting their news from Roca. 

Three months after that, we ran our first Instagram Roca Wrap, a “deep-dive” on the GameStop meme-trading frenzy. Overnight, our follower count jumped from 2,000 to 3,000. At that point, we realized what we needed to do: Make straightforward, non-partisan news enjoyable and convenient. We’ve been doing that every day since.

In the five years since we pushed “publish” on our first website, we’ve been through the highest highs and lowest lows. From the party we threw at 100,000 followers to nearly going under six months later; from building a business as friends to losing friendships over our coverage; from posting one dud YouTube doc after another until posting one that got 6,000,000 views. Throughout this, we’ve learned enough to write a book. But it’s a Tuesday morning, so we’ll limit it to five basic lessons. 

First: We love what we do and who we do it with.

For more than 1,800 days, we’ve woken up and worked on the news – and have never wanted to do anything else. This is our passion, and we’re honored to be doing it as three best friends, aided by a phenomenal staff who work their asses off out of love for our mission.  

Second: How hard it is to go from being an Instagram page to a news outlet.

Just because you have a million followers doesn’t mean you’re a news company. It took us a few years to understand that. But now, we’ve completed that transformation, largely through our original reporting. No longer do people look at us as an Instagram news summary account. Our long-form YouTube docs now reach 4,000,000+ people a month; this newsletter’s original reporting goes out to 300,000 people a day; and we deliver original content to nearly 1,800,000 Instagram followers. After five years, we’re not just @RideTheNews.

Third: The issues that plagued the news in 2020 aren’t going away.

We used to think it was a few bad apples who were responsible, either woke or right-wing journalists. Now, we realize that our corporate news system incentivizes terrible content. The companies giving you news are generally owned by either asset managers or billionaires and recruit from ideologically captured institutions. They all have their own interests, which likely diverge from yours and the general public’s at large.

Fourth: That the big guys are weaker than they look.

When we started Roca, “taking down Big News” seemed like a pipe dream. Today, it’s not: Their subscriber bases are in free fall; their audiences are shrinking. They’ve become a meme – walking zombies. They’re still making billions of dollars, but only because they’ve captured parts of the older demographic. Every day, they get weaker. Soon enough, Fox News and CNN will be shells of themselves. In the media business, this is an open secret. 

And fifth: A news outlet is only as good as its audience.

In the course of doing Roca, we’ve visited dozens of states and countries and met hundreds of Roca readers. Invariably, they have been intelligent, warm, and laidback people, who want to keep up with what’s happening in the world without bias or fear. That’s why we started the company, and it’s only because we’ve built an audience of millions of people like that that we are still here five years after hitting publish.

So today, we’d like to thank all of our readers, our staff, and our friends and family. Whether you just found Roca today or visited that atrociously designed rocanews.com back on August 25, 2020, you are the reason we’re still here.

Big News is crumbling, RocaNews is rising, and it’s all because of you, Roca Nation.

Editor’s Note

Thank you all for your support of our mission. When we launched Roca, we knew there were millions of like-minded people – we just needed to reach them. Thankfully, we have. We love what we do, and it’s because of you all. The Roca Wave is growing by the day. We can’t wait for the next five years. 

And, as always, you can find our recent reporting below.

• Loomer Looms Large

• Oakland's Political Experiment Gone Wrong

• Are We Normalizing Trump? Our Reply

• Sam Altman’s Media Strategy

• Trump’s Subtle Takeover of American Industry

See you tomorrow,
Max, Max, and Billy