🌊 A Note on Roca’s Coverage

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By Max Frost

Good morning, Roca Nation. 

Around this time last year, we began sending this newsletter as a weekly collection of our election reporting. People enjoyed it and let us know, so we began devoting more time and energy to it. Then earlier this year, we started receiving requests from readers looking for non-partisan breakdowns about what was happening under the new administration. So, we expanded it from weekly to daily to see if people would like that, and they did. 

It’s now been seven months since We The 66 became a daily newsletter. In that period, we’ve been trying to figure out what our readers would want next. Today, we bring you that: The debut of “NTK” stories within this newsletter. 

Moving forward, each We The 66 newsletter will contain the daily deep-dive, plus what we consider the day’s four “Need-to-Know” stories. We’ll link out to the NTKs while keeping the full deep-dive in the email, as we’ve been doing since February. We’ve been writing these NTKs for over two years now; however, they’ve only been in our iOS app. Moving forward, you’ll be able to get them in email and online, too. 

Perhaps the most frequent complaint we hear from readers is that they want a full news diet from Roca, not just one-off stories and daily summaries. We hope this move addresses that and look forward to hearing your thoughts about it.   

So without further ado, here are four stories to know today: 

While we’re here, we want to share a few thoughts on our coverage and Roca overall. 

Let’s start with our story selection. Choosing four “Need-to-Knows” requires us to decide what content we think people “need to know.” So how do we pick them? 

Tweeters and Redditors have theorized that we pick stories to advance certain agendas: Pro-CIA, pro-Trump, pro-Palestine, pro-Israel, pro-Pakistan, pro-India, pro-Republican, pro-Democrat. The reality is less interesting. (“That’s exactly what a spy would say!”)

Everyone knows where to go if they want to prove to themselves how bad Republicans or Democrats are. In the 1990s, businesses realized how lucrative that ideological pigeon-holing can be, so they – from cable news to broadcast networks and newspapers – went to their respective ideological corner. That left a vacuum for those who want to read the news to better understand what’s going on in the world, not to advance their ideological agenda.

We started Roca to cater to those people, and we select stories we believe those readers will want. 

That often means politics, but not necessarily: We believe our readers want journalists to explore notable trends that are taking place; to hear the thoughts of people impacted by major issues and report back on what they are saying; to keep abreast of the most contentious stories and help readers understand the facts; and to cut through the noise on complex stories.

Our guiding principle is not to promote an agenda, a side, or a certain topic. It’s to ensure that we document for our readers what’s happening around the world, without bias or fear. Our NTK coverage will do that on a daily basis moving forward. 

One last note: A few readers have asked us what Roca is. Are we a newsletter? An app company? An Instagram page? 

We provide daily news via our newsletter, app, and Instagram, reaching 2M+ people each day. On our YouTube, we post minidocumentaries of our on-the-ground reporting. We put out 2-3 of those videos weekly, including one this weekend from New York City’s blue-collar oil suburbs. Here’s a sample of what the commenters are saying: 

So check it out if you haven’t. And in the meantime, read those NTKs and let us know what you think!

Editor’s Note

As always, thank you for reading Roca. We’re grateful for your support, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the NTKs. Let us know what you think by replying here.

And if you want to catch up on our latest deep-dives, find them here:

We’ll be back with more tomorrow.
—Max and Max