Rewriting the News Playbook: How RocaNews engages Gen Z with non-partisan content
When the three founders of RocaNews, Billy Carney, Max Frost and Max Towey, came together in 2020 to form their company – which provides current affairs content on social media – they noticed two main problems with the news.
“One, it was overly partisan,” Carney pointed out from the Innovation Stage at this year’s FIPP World Media Congress in Madrid.
“It was peak Covid and you turned on one channel on TV, and you get something; turn on a different channel, you get something totally different. There’s very little dissent on these TV channels, and we thought: There’s got to be a better way to do this somewhere in the middle.”
The second problem the founders of RocaNews picked up was that it felt inaccessible to new, younger readers. For generations fed news on TikTok and Instagram, looking at the coverage of a legacy newspaper – where you pick and choose what to read – can seem overwhelming.
“A lot of these stories start on chapter five and it’s a very long narrative, and kind of difficult to get into it,” said Carney.
“As a quantitative confirmation about what I’m talking about, we often point to a 2019 Reuters Institute report that said 70% or 66% of young people are totally disengaged with the news.
“They don’t interact with it, they think it’s biased, they think it’s partisan, they think it’s inflammatory, and just kind of out of touch and hard to relate to.”
Finding a new way
Working out of their living room in Washington, D.C., the three RocaNews founders set about trying to reach younger news readers in a more effective way.
“In the first few months of Roca, we tried a lot of different things, and frankly, pretty much nothing worked,” admitted Carney. “We were throwing stuff at the wall, seeing what stuck, and that was very little.”
Eventually the trio came to realisation that they need to focus more on one platform.
“Instead of trying to have a website, and newsletters, and YouTube, and everything we have now, and way beyond, we narrowed it down and said: Ok, we ourselves as founders spend most of our time on Instagram. Our friends also spend most of their time on Instagram.
“If we can crack the code on Instagram, where we hang out, I think we’ll be able to make a successful news product and build beyond that.”
The main point of difference of RocaNews was that the media company would not just put a photo on Instagram with a brief description and a link to a bio. Instead, they took an article written for the Roca newsletter and transferred it over to Instagram, putting the actual text in the slides.
A quick fix
After seeing traction with this approach, they doubled down striving to take an entire daily news product and put it on Instagram. They found an answer in unique QuickCards – a bullet-point news rundown starting with a fun first slide (Frodo Baggins holding a bank in his hand, Walter White with an AWS cap) before subsequent slides covering news events like the launch of Erebor bank or an outage suffered by Amazon.
The launch of QuickCards was gamechanger. “It was our biggest day of growth,” said Carney. “So, we spent effectively the next 10 months, the three of us, full-time growth hacking this strategy.
“We went from about essentially zero followers to 900,000 in a year. With the momentum from that growth on Instagram, we were able to do a few things. We started launching other products and we raised some money in order to do that, to hire some more team members, a very wonderful team.”
After raising $4.5 million, RocaNews built an app that, inspired by Duolingo, brought gameplay to news.
“Effectively you’re shown a photo of a story happening somewhere in the world,” explained Carney. “You then have to guess where that story takes place.
“The closer you are, the more points you get, then you read the actual story. And that’s a way of us getting people more interested, more involved in any particular story.”
About a year and a half ago, RocaNews also started a video operation, primarily on YouTube, doing interviews on the ground.
“Since we started doing these on-the-ground reports, people have interacted with us in a way that’s very different from before,” said Carney. “I think they feel it in a certain way when they see it on video. So again, this is something we’re investing in.”
By thinking outside the box, RocaNews have grown rapidly. It now has millions of regular readers/views and hundreds of millions of monthly content views. Most of its audience members are 18-35 year-olds with 60% men and 40% women. It is a primary news source for 71% of regular readers.
“We have our daily news pretty much across every platform. We have premium, paid subscription content on Apple and through a paid newsletter. We have on-the-ground reporting on most of our platforms.
“And then we have a daily show we launched about two weeks ago. We have some pretty big plans for that,” said Carney. “We crossed into profitability last year, so this year has been more about scaling. There’s a lot we want to do.”
