From the ground up

Building a small business, newsletter by newsletter.

When we launched the Tucson Agenda in July 2023, we were full of piss and vinegar.

We wanted to reinvent old-school local journalism.

We still do.

But, as we’ve learned over the past two years, you can’t just dream about doing something big. You have to build an organization to get you there.

What started out as two reporters scrambling to fill a newsletter five days a week has grown to include five publications, four reporters, a tech guru, and a stable of freelancers, contractors and assorted help.

In the last two years that we’ve been building the Tucson Agenda, many of you have supported us with paid subscriptions. (Thank you!)

So today, we’re going to talk a little about what you paid subscribers have helped build.

And if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, we’d like to make our case for why the Tucson Agenda is worthy of your support.

We’re just as excited as this javelina to bring you the news every morning.

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A brief (re)introduction

This is old news for readers who’ve been with us since the beginning (thank you for that!), but the Tucson Agenda is a daily newsletter focused on local government and politics in the Tucson area.

We’re not backed by any billionaires. We’re not controlled by a corporate newspaper chain. We’re not a pseudo-journalism outfit that’s really funded by political activists.

We’re a bootstrapped, independent news organization that’s owned and operated by veteran local news reporters.

And nearly all our revenue comes from regular people who put up their hard-earned money to support local, independent journalism.

Pretty cool, right?

We launched two years ago (with the help of our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda) after the local corporate daily newspaper laid off another dozen journalists.¹

Since then, we’ve built a team of experienced reporters who live and breathe local news.

Everybody at the Tucson Agenda and the Arizona Agenda has worked here in Tucson, including individual stints at the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Weekly, and the Tucson Citizen (and various other papers around Southern Arizona).

Most of what you read in the Tucson Agenda is written by Joe Ferguson. He handles the on-the-ground reporting in Tucson. Curt Prendergast (who moved to Pennsylvania last fall after living in Southern Arizona for 18 years) is the managing editor of the Tucson Agenda and the rest of what we call the Agendaverse. He writes the In Other News section and keeps the trains running on time. Hank Stephenson and Nicole Ludden, both veterans of the Weekly and the Star, provide reporting, editing and moral support to the Tucson Agenda crew, and hold down the Arizona Agenda.

And we rely on a team of steady freelancers to help put out our three weekly policy newsletters, the Education Agenda the Water Agenda and the A.I. Agenda.

As an organization, we now put out a whopping 13 newsletter editions per week, which means we’re constantly looking for ways to move faster, simplify our workflow and get everybody rowing in the same direction. (If any of you watched the first few seasons of “The Bear,” it’s a little like that.)

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Our business model

This newsletter is not a hobby or a side-hustle — it’s our full-time job.

We put in long hours and meet tight deadlines so we can be in your inbox at 6 a.m. every Monday-Friday.

And in an era of constant notifications, there’s something very comforting in that once-a-day rhythm. We help you stay up to date on everything a local civics junkie would need to know without doomscrolling your life away.

We’re really the only news outlet in town that still operates on that old-school schedule.

The newsletter format also means we’re not interested in clickbait or viral content. Those get eyeballs, not long-term supporters.

Our business model is a strange one: We provide the Tucson Agenda for free to anyone who wants it.

People sign up as free readers, and eventually, some of them like it so much that they pay for it — even though they don’t get anything extra (except the ability to join our community of commenters).

But really, our subscribers choose to pay because they find value in the Tucson Agenda, and they want it to exist.

And having you readers as the cornerstone of our financial foundation means we’re accountable to you. Your funding stays with us, paying veteran reporters to keep an eye on politicians and policy in your community.

The math is pretty simple: For every 1,000 paid subscribers, we can hire an additional experienced local reporter.

And every day, we’re slowly growing thanks to subscribers like you who click that button.

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Where we’re going

Our goal here at the Agenda is to make tools to help you navigate civic life.

In its most basic form, these tools are newsletters, journalistic “explainers” about how government works, or reminding readers about important upcoming dates, like the last day to mail in your ballot for the CD7 election (July 8).

But we’re an ambitious bunch.

Our colleagues at the Arizona Agenda built a legislative-tracking service, Skywolf, that gives us an insider’s view of the Legislature.

Behind the scenes, we’ve built a sophisticated online workspace that allows us to collaborate while one of us is running around the state Capitol and another is at the funky Tucson City Hall building.

We also built a massive database of news stories, which we use to curate our daily “In Other News” sections.

We have big plans for that database. We’re building a tool that will help us curate news more efficiently. The basic tool helps us do our jobs better. The more sophisticated version will help you understand the news better.

When you get down to it, we couldn’t do any of this cool stuff without the foundation laid by our readers, especially the paid subscribers.

We’ve built something rare — and we’re just getting started. If you believe in this work, now’s the time to invest in it.

1. Including Curt, who was the Daily Star’s opinion page editor.