Rob Report News has been publishing since February. I never announced it because we were trying to get it right. So it sat there and it ran. I rebuilt the front end twice, broke the feed more than once, and kept publishing to an audience of almost nobody while I fixed it. It’s ready now. Running every ten minutes.
The site pulls trucking news every ten minutes from more than a hundred sources. FreightWaves, Transport Topics, CCJ, Overdrive, Land Line, Fleet Owner, DC Velocity, the trades you already read and a few you don’t. It runs the Federal Register dockets for FMCSA, PHMSA and NHTSA. It runs DOJ and FBI press releases, which is how a cargo theft indictment reaches you before anybody writes it up. As of this week it runs a foreign desk: DVSA enforcement and traffic commissioner decisions out of the UK, cabotage and Mobility Package changes out of the EU, NHVR and chain of responsibility out of Australia, NZTA out of New Zealand. If it’s trucking news, the feed takes you there. I don’t care which outlet published it and I don’t get paid when you click.
We also write our own. Nothing changes there. The longer original work continues on Substack at Talking Wreckless, where the ghost fleet investigation ran, and where the ELD fraud and chameleon carrier reporting lives. Those pieces take weeks. The wire takes ten minutes. Both belong on the same site.
I’m looking for contributors. If you’re in this industry and you write, or you’ve thought about writing, I want to hear from you. From the truck, from the insurance office, from the claims desk, from dispatch, from the safety department, from the shop. Twenty-five years in and I still learn more from a driver explaining what actually happens at a receiver than from any trade piece about receiver detention. You don’t need a byline history. You need to know something and be willing to put your name on it.
I haven’t taken advertisers. Not because nobody’s asked, and not out of some purity thing. I’ve been on the other side of this. I’ve watched what advertising does to trade coverage: which stories run, which ones die on the vine, who gets called for comment and who gets a phone call before publication. It happens quietly and everyone in the business knows it happens. That’s not one outlet; that’s often just what media has become. Trade or not.
If and when I do take advertising, it won’t be all comers. I’ve spent a career buying and using equipment, software, insurance products and services in this industry, and I know which ones don’t perform. I’m not lending my name to a product I’d warn a friend away from, for any amount of money. A sponsor doesn’t buy protection. If a company advertising here does something that becomes news, we’ll report it the same way we’d report it about anyone else. Contributed content doesn’t get pulled because of who’s paying either. If it’s bad, it’s bad whether there’s a check attached or not. You can’t sponsor us into silence.
That’s the whole standard. It isn’t complicated and it isn’t new. It’s just rarer in press than it should be.
Next is the Compass series: how to run a better fleet, built around risk. Not compliance theater and not a checklist you print and file. What your loss runs are telling you that your safety scores aren’t, why your insurance renewal went the way it did, where the exposure actually sits in a driver file, what a plaintiff’s lawyer sees when they pull your record. I’ve written the safety programs, sat for the depositions, reconstructed the crashes and testified for both sides. Compass is what I’d tell you if you hired me.
The wire is free and there’s no paywall. It updates while you’re reading it.
The line about learning more from a driver explaining what happens at a receiver than from a trade piece about detention. I am on the other side of that door, so here is the receiving version.
Most of the wait is not us being slow. It is that the driver showed up into a plan nobody updated. The door he was scheduled for still has a load on it that ran long. My receiving lead knows that at 6am. The driver does not find out until he is standing in the yard, because telling him is not written down as anybody's job.
So he sits. The hours everybody argues about later got made before he ever pulled in.
The other half is paper. A pack that does not match the PO turns a 40 minute unload into two hours while somebody hunts down a buyer who went home at four.
None of that lands on the detention invoice. The invoice says hours. It never says which side of the door made them.