The Daily Agenda: Opinion desk goes quiet at the UA student paper

The UA’s student paper has shut down its opinion page, citing budget cuts ... While it wasn’t an intentional effort to silence student reporters, that’s still the end result ... Time to play Monopoly.

It’s the final stretch of Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan collaboration that shines a light on the importance of open government and public records. All week long, we’ve been sharing stories that highlight the value of freedom of information laws and raising funds so that we can continue our work.

A lot of those public records are complicated and buried within government departments. Rather than wait for reporters or the general public to file time-consuming records requests, sometimes officials take the first step. 

They create data dashboards by compiling massive amounts of data and presenting it to the public. Curt loves these things, and we’ve highlighted them several times since we launched last July, whether it’s the state reporting trauma injuries, the University of Arizona tracking local economic trends, or the City of Tucson measuring equity all the way down to the neighborhood level. 

They’re all tools that help the public understand the world around them. And that’s what we try to do, too. 

Help us raise funds to continue to keep you in the know.

Student media has become the latest victim in the University of Arizona’s financial crisis, but it’s a little more nuanced than the staffing and budget cuts affecting other departments.

This hit came in a very specific and fell swoop, taking out a single and noteworthy part of the student paper: Its opinion desk.

Former Daily Wildcat Opinion Editor Olivia Krupp and Assistant Opinion Editor Luke Lawson wrote about the desk’s closure and their firings in an opinion piece in the Arizona Daily Star earlier this month. But these are journalists who have been silenced, and they want to tell their story far and wide. So, they contacted the Tucson Agenda earlier this week to share their story and try to find some clarity.

Caitlin spoke with Krupp, the former opinion editor, whose work she was already familiar with. Krupp has tackled charged issues and was the subject of online harassment and subsequently doxxed after writing about a fraternity member and affluent campus TikTok influencer.

Krupp opined on a variety of topics during her years on the DW opinion desk, including UA officials’ policies and practices. But she hadn’t recently and neither she nor Lawson were among the growing group of journalists writing about the school’s financial crisis. That’s why she found the timing to be so odd.

“I asked the other staff we were having the meeting with who specifically these cuts were coming from and who told them that they had to cut 10-15%. That was very unclear and still is,” Krupp told Caitlin on Tuesday. “It was so unexpected and completely out of the blue.”

After her firing, Krupp sent emails to 10 UA administrators asking if they could provide more information about the situation.

“I received no response. I followed up, and there’s been no response to that,” she said. “It’s not like we were getting paid a significant amount. It’s like $120 every other week. No one is doing this for the money, clearly.”

Krupp said she was told during the meeting with the DW’s advisor, editor-in-chief and managing editor that the decision to close the desk and eliminate her and Luke’s positions was a direct result of the financial crisis. They said that the remaining staff reporters would still be allowed to write reviews, but it’s unclear if there would be an actual platform for true opinion pieces.

“We were told it’s a business decision and nothing personal, essentially, but it’s unclear to me whether or not this was a Daily Wildcat decision. They’re within their rights to do that, but regardless, the financial crisis is impacting student media,” she said. “I don’t want to sound juvenile, but it’s very unfair. Nothing happened to the other desks and it seems weird that it’s just the opinions desk.¹”

We agreed, so we reached out to the UA to try to get some answers about the situation.

We were told that the Daily Wildcat makes its own staffing decisions, meaning this wasn’t a shady attempt by the powers that be to keep the school paper’s opinion desk from weighing in on the financial crisis.

“The university supports the Daily Wildcat and the students who contribute to it, but the Daily Wildcat is an independent student-run newspaper, and the staffing changes that occurred were solely at the discretion of student leadership at the newspaper,” Associate Vice President, External Communications Pam Scott said in a statement to the Agenda.

The Daily Wildcat’s opinions page remains, but it now features reviews of theater and entertainment shows and predictions about sports.

But even if the closure of the desk wasn’t intended to silence students who might not be happy with the school’s administration, it did. It also helped to add to the chipping away at newsroom positions across the United States. And none of us think that’s right.

Southern Arizona has already lost dozens of reporters in recent years, and while efforts are underway to add to the region’s journalism workforce, we don’t want to see any more positions taken away.

And the opinion desk is an important part of a newsroom, especially on a college campus where students are rarely part of the conversation when decisions are being made.

We understand that cuts have to be made, but they shouldn’t come at the expense of a free press.

“This was the only desk where students had the freedom to speak about subjects of real importance,” Krupp said. “They cut a really important part of student media and it was directly because of the budget cuts.”

Not an ad: Yesterday, we included an item in Other News that showed Rep. Juan Ciscomani endorsing former President Donald Trump. Ciscomani posted it on his X (Twitter) account, which is the type of thing we routinely include in Other News. It’s noteworthy that Ciscomani, a Republican who ran as a moderate in a swing district, endorsed Trump. But we inadvertently cropped the part that showed it was a tweet, so it came out looking like a political ad. That was our mistake and we corrected the online version. We’ve heard from readers who were rightfully upset, thinking we ran a political ad in support of Trump. We don’t run political ads and we have no plans to start. 

Rating downgrade: The University of Arizona got dinged by a national credit rating firm, the Arizona Daily Star's Ellie Wolfe reports. Moody's Investors Service downgraded the UA's rating from "credit positive" to "negative," citing the ongoing financial crisis and gloomy outlook for the coming year, along with weak financial monitoring and "ongoing governance scrutiny."

Another side of the story: While much of the news about asylum seekers in Tucson focuses on the need to shore up federal funding, KGUN's Adam Klepp drove around with a Tucson taxi driver, Jesus Poblete, who's been busy driving asylum seekers from shelters to the airport. And the ride doesn't end there. He often gets out of his cab and helps them check-in to their flights. 

“I never used to get out, but I found the need because they ask me for help, and it’s not a crime to help someone," Poblete said.

Housing troubles continue: Despite the low statewide unemployment rate, evictions remain a big problem in Pima County, Arizona Public Media’s Hannah Cree reports. A study from the UA’s Southwest Institute for Research on Women showed about 10% of renters are behind on their rent. The good news is that average rents in Tucson grew by 5%, which is a “significant slowdown.”

Game time: You can now check out what made it into the Tucson version of the Monopoly game, This is Tucson’s Gloria Knott reports. The new version of the game was unveiled last weekend at Hotel Congress. We took a peek at the website and the game features the Loop, The Loft Cinema, monsoon season, iconic local businesses, and much more. 

First challenge: In a move that should come as no surprise, a state lawmaker is calling for a repeal of the firearms-related ordinance the Pima County Board of Supervisors approved last week. Rep. Quang Nguyen sent a letter to the supervisors saying the ordinance violates state law by “imposing on lawful gun owners mandatory and stringent reporting requirements for a ‘knowing loss or theft of a firearm’ and places significant penalties up to $1,000 for each violation.” Supervisor Rex Scott said at last week’s meeting the ordinance was designed to combat straw purchasing, where a person buys a gun on behalf of another person who’s prohibited from owning a firearm. 

131: That’s how many Agenda readers responded to our survey so far. We can’t thank you enough. We’re already starting to get a clearer picture of who our readers are and the news they’d like to read. Please take a moment to fill it out. It’s just 10 questions and most of them are multiple-choice. It won’t take more than a minute or two.

1. A previous version of this story included an reporting note that was inadvertently left in during the copy editing process.