🌊 Roca Has a Revelation

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From the outside, political conventions look like public events where you sign up, get your pass, show up at the arena, and get in for speeches by prominent public figures.

That couldn’t be further from the truth: They are exclusive events catering to the elite of the elite – to the party’s movers and shakers, the media, donors, and lobbyists. If you aren’t in that world or connected to it, you aren’t inside.

In Chicago this week, we learned how this worked. Amid that, we realized something about ourselves. This “revelation” came on Monday, after we arrived in Chicago after a week spent driving around and talking to voters in Wisconsin.

We dropped our rental car off in downtown Chicago at the Hyatt Regency, where dozens of delegates and journalists were waiting in the lobby, preparing to board shuttles to the DNC. These shuttles bring the attendees from their four- and five-star hotels in Chicago’s central business district to the arena, where suites go for $500,000+. When the speeches end, the shuttles return and bring the attendees back downtown, where nights of parties at high-end restaurants, hotels, and museums await them. On Friday, the delegates and journalists head to the airports and fly home.

That was not the case for your correspondents at RocaNews.

After we dropped our car off at the Hyatt, we boarded the L train (Chicago’s metro) and rode seven stops east to Kedzie station, where we walked down a street lined by crumbling buildings and fenced-in pit bulls. Eventually we reached our Airbnb, which had six security cameras and three dead-bolt doors. Inside, a Google search revealed that the neighborhood – East Garfield Park – has the highest homicide rate in Chicago, aka “Chiraq.” A week prior, a 17-year-old had been murdered four blocks from our apartment.

You might think such an Airbnb rents for a pittance, but you’d be wrong: This cost $275 a night. To get in with the big boys downtown, rooms started around $500.

Each day, we passed a gun violence prevention center, had conversations with neighbors who had seen the area devastated by crime, and heard stories about how the collapse of manufacturing had impoverished hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans. One day, on the way into the city, we saw a man smoking crack inside the L train. Then we disembarked in the nice parts of Chicago and got to work covering the news.

So the revelation: Living the hotel-arena-party cycle lets one see only a fraction of the world. To paint the world as it actually is, journalists must see both the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly. But why would someone voluntarily stay in East Garfield Park when they could stay at the Hyatt? Why would they talk to the gang member when they can talk to the delegate?

So we realized that our job – as a hungry and raw news startup – is to fill the void that the shuttle passengers can’t possibly fill; to go to places the shuttle passengers won’t or can’t go and to share our learnings here.

That’s what we will be doing in this newsletter in the months ahead.

Now, back to our coverage from Pennsylvania.

In Erie, Pennsylvania, a Donald Trump mannequin sat in an abandoned Walgreens parking lot. Next to it was a man hoping to swing the 2024 election.

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