🌊 A Note on Roca's Coverage

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If you want top-down journalism that only tells you what you want to hear, you’re in the wrong place. Unsubscribe! Cancel your subscription! Delete this email!

But if you want grassroots journalism by people committed to capturing the world as it is and reporting without spin or fear, you’re in the right place.

Ahead of the election, we were inundated with messages, comments, and emails accusing us of threatening our democracy by airing the perspectives of Trump voters. Whenever Trump voters would comment on our content, people would tell us to delete the comments. It was a concerted effort to slant things so Harris looked more popular and Trump looked less so. These same critics accused us of being fringe by having Trump supporters in our audience. Well, he got 51% of the vote. If you don’t have Trump supporters in your audience, you’re fringe.

Anonymous social media haters accuse us of being a right-wing outlet because we have Trump-voting readers. But we also have Bernie-voting readers, Harris-voting readers, and Jill Stein-voting readers – and that’s how a news outlet should be: If it doesn’t have readers of all persuasions, it’s only creating value for a subset of the population. Yet most outlets fail that test, because they believe there is a correct side and try to align their news to fit it.

This blinding allegiance to one side is destroying legacy news. It’s why outlets have been cranking out stories to explain how they mislead their readers into thinking Harris would win.

If you read our on-the-ground coverage, you knew that Trump was more popular in every swing state we visited. To reiterate once more: People accused us of bias because they said Trump couldn’t possibly be as popular as our interviews would suggest.

Here are a couple representative comments: “Rocanews you clearly pushing Trump in all your videos and believe you edited it to appear Trump will win. Clear as day your Republican pushes. But egg on your face when you lose.”

“Looks like I’ve stumbled onto a MAGA supporter site. I’m leaving now. Kamala’s got this and you guys are nuts.”

And countless other messages.

Wrong!

Alas, Trump won – and if you’ve been reading or watching our reporting, you probably saw that coming. That’s because our reporting seeks to capture the world as it is, not as we or others want it to be.

Some critics took issue with our methodology of interviewing random people in each swing state. As one Redditor wrote, “Interviewing uninformed people on the street and making a prediction on it seems stupid.” But the precise problem with journalists is that they don’t interview people on the street, and whether or not you consider someone “uninformed,” they get a vote.

A typical journalist at a legacy news outlet has notable sources in the place they are reporting from. If they’re going to, say, Georgia, they’ll get in touch with that source – perhaps a local journalist or activist – hear their perspective, and go from there. This top-down journalism results in the journalist learning through a filter that can make their reporting less accurate, though.

We – originally out of necessity, now out of choice – attempt to do grassroots journalism. We go somewhere and try to talk to as many people as possible. If we want to know how a state will vote, we seek to see things through the eyes of “regular” people.

Since July, we’ve attempted to report the state of the US as accurately as possible. We thank you for placing your trust in us and are glad it appears not to have been in vain.

Why Trump Won

The media is doing its post-mortem on how America could elect Donald Trump for the second time in three elections. At each outlet, “analysts” are debating how much to blame Biden, Harris, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, the “center left,” and the “far left.”

Here’s what we know based on our conversations with hundreds of swing voters.

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading Roca throughout this election cycle. We can’t wait to bring the same unbiased, curious lens to our reporting in the months and years ahead. If there are topics you want us to cover, please let us know!

-Max and Max

RocaNews co-founders