The Daily Agenda: Still dreaming big
The Tucson Agenda's monthly business check-in ... Choosing Bronson's replacement.
Somebody pinch us, please.
We’ve been publishing the Tucson Agenda for five months now and we still can’t believe it’s real. It’s a dream come true to get to publish our own newsletter. We can’t thank our supporters enough.
The end of another month of publishing brings with it our monthly check-in with our readers. For our new readers, this is where we go over what we did the previous month and talk to you about what we’re planning for the next few months.
To paraphrase every president who’s ever given a State of the Union address: “The state of our newsletter is strong!”
Thanks to our paid subscribers, we keep building our financial strength. We passed the halfway point to being financially sustainable in October. We’re now able to say we’re two-thirds of the way to that goal.
We’re growing our team every chance we get. We’re bringing on two new interns in January. Our sister newsletter the Arizona Agenda hired Nicole Ludden, a talented reporter you might know from her work at the Arizona Daily Star.
We’re trying out new ways to bring you the news. We dug through the archives of local newspapers to bring you a view of what Tucsonans were talking about during Thanksgiving week 1923. It was shocking to see how little has changed, at least in some way, over the past 100 years.
We’re dabbling with AI. It’s an intriguing tool and we plan to put it to work wherever it’s useful. So far, we’re just using it to generate colorful images. But it also might help lighten the workload for dealing with large documents and reams of meeting agendas.
We’re broadening the conversation we have with our readers about local government and politics. We started asking for letters to the editor on Monday and the letters already are starting to trickle in. Just a few so far, but it takes time to get something like this up and running.
Don’t hesitate to write. We’d love to hear from you. You can find the guidelines for writing letters here. Send your submissions— 100 words or less—to curt@tucsonagenda.com. Be sure to put “Letter to the editor” in the subject line.
People seem to like what we’re doing. Our readership keeps growing steadily. We added more than 270 subscribers last month, including 61 readers who decided to support us with a paid subscription.
The ad we ran in the Star in early November gave us a big bump in paid subscriptions. We’re putting that down as money well spent!
Out and about
Running the Agenda isn’t just putting out a newsletter five days a week. We also are out and about as much as we can.
It was a busy month, with plenty of events and opportunities to connect with the community and Agenda readers. Caitlin spent several days at the TenWest Impact Festival, watching sessions, talking with attendees and making a list of potential coverage topics. TenWest is full of innovators and provided plenty of inspiration for future stories and people with whom we’d like to connect.
Both Curt and Caitlin were excited to attend the launch last month of the Community Foundation of Southern Arizona’s Local News Initiative, which aims to raise $1 million over the next year to help bring more reporting jobs to local, independent news outlets in Southern Arizona.
It was basically the biggest group of journalists we’ve been around since the start of the pandemic, and it was great to reconnect with friends and colleagues and talk with community members who are passionate about supporting local news.
Caitlin was a guest at a Pima County Democratic Party’s Legislative District 17 meeting last month and talked with attendees about the state of local news and where they can find comprehensive coverage of Southern Arizona and the 2024 elections.
We’re excited to continue to work with other community groups, so if you’d like us to come talk with your neighborhood association, class or other type of group, send us a note at info@tucsonagenda.com.
And finally, the solutions-focused community book club that Caitlin and the Agenda co-host with the Community Foundation of Southern Arizona and Tucson Tome Gnome is really picking up steam. We had roughly 70 attendees at last week’s meeting, during which we discussed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond’s book, “Poverty, by America.”
This particular meeting was a super collaboration involving several other groups, including Pima County Workforce and Development, SVP Tucson, Primavera Foundation and the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth and Families.
We’re taking a break for the holidays, but the book club will meet again on January 24 to discuss Jojo Moyes’ “The Giver of Stars.” It’s free to attend, but you need to sign up in advance. You can find more information and RSVP here.
Digital storytelling
We’d like to make politics and government more accessible to more people, so last month we launched a fundraising campaign to hire a part-time digital storyteller. The idea is to make podcasts and videos a regular part of our coverage, while also stepping up our social media game.
A digital storyteller also will give us more options when we decide how to cover stories. We’re both writers, but we understand the written word isn’t the best way to tell every story. Sometimes, video and audio just do it better.
Take the example of Caitlin’s story about Southern Arizona Construction Career Days. That story would have benefited greatly from video reporting. It’s one thing to tell you about teens driving backhoes and participating in simulated gas leaks; it’s quite another to show you the excitement on their faces and let you hear their laughter.
Caitlin’s story about Joyce Feickert’s efforts to reinvent the neighborhood seamstress on Tucson’s south side is another example. There was just no way to adequately convey in writing Feickert’s emotion when she talked about her mother or her experiences teaching other women how to sew.
If we had a digital storyteller and better equipment, we could bring subscribers the whole story and paint a fuller, more vibrant picture. If that’s something you’d like to see, you can make a tax-deductible donation through our partners at the nonprofit Local Media Foundation, which allows independent outlets like ours to solicit tax-deductible donations.
But don’t wait too long, the fundraising campaign only runs through the end of the year.
Not every story is a visual story, though, so our digital storyteller will also help us be more active on social media and try to grow and develop our audience on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. We need the community’s support to help us reach our fundraising goal and bring on a multimedia specialist to grow the Digital Agenda.
What’s on deck
Tucsonans want to know what the state Legislature is doing. Curt heard that over and over again from readers when he was the opinion editor at the Star. When the legislative session starts next month, we’ll be there covering it for you.
We’ll be sure to cover the wackiness, of course, but our main goal will be to help you understand the substance of what your legislators are doing. (If you want us to cover anything in particular, that would be a good topic for a letter to the editor)
We have our sights set on the 2024 elections. Voters are going to reshape local government at pretty much every level and we want them to know every relevant detail about candidates and races.
And, it goes without saying, the presidential and Senate races are going to be wild, and wildly consequential. We’ll be right there with you as the madness unfolds.
It’s going to be a big year. If we want to do it right, we have to think through how we’re going to allocate our reporting time. We also have to take care of a ton of stuff on the business side. Not to mention, we need to spend some time with our loved ones who’ve patiently supported us as we devoted so much time to getting this newsletter up and running.
To give us a chance to do that, we won’t publish from Dec. 18-29. We hate to do it. We live and breathe this newsletter. But we are going to have to pry our fingers off the keyboard.
Prosperity wins: Pima County Supervisors voted 3-1 to implement the Pima County Prosperity Initiative and its 13 evidence-based policies to reduce generational poverty and improve individual and community wealth. Supervisor Steve Christy opposed the initiative, saying supervisors should not vote on the item until all five districts are represented. Former District 3 Supervisor Sharon Bronson retired last Monday, leaving the seat vacant and 200,000 taxpayers without representation until a replacement is chosen.
“(This) represents much more than our board merely adopting a set of policies and the means for implementing them; it is a moral undertaking,” Supervisor Rex Scott said before voting in support of the initiative. “If we do this right, we can help to improve the lives of thousands within our community, especially its children.”
Bad blood: University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins came under fire at Monday’s Faculty Senate meeting, with one professor accusing him of violating state laws in his handling of the school’s financial crisis, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar reports. Several attendees criticized Robbins’ handling of the situation, with faculty senate chairperson Leila Hudson saying it’s become clear that Robbins doesn’t intend to “engage shared governance in the formulation or review” of the corrective plan.
New blood: The Tucson Sentinel’s Blake Morlock breaks down the eight applicants vying to replace Bronson as District 3’s Pima County Supervisor. Applicants had until last Friday to submit a resume and fill out a questionnaire, with a handful of notable names ending up on the list, including Matt Kopec, Kristen Randall and Jennifer Allen. A decision will be made in the next few weeks about who will assume the post, with the plan being to have someone in place at the start of 2024 who is able to run in the fall for a full four-year term.
Traffic update: The 54th Annual Fourth Avenue Winter Street Fair is back this weekend, resulting in road closures starting noon Thursday and running through 11 p.m. on Sunday. Fourth Avenue will be closed south of University Boulevard to Eighth Street, with additional side street closures also planned. The Sun Link Streetcar will be adjusting its route to accommodate the fair and Sun Tran buses will provide service to streetcar passengers around the closure. For more information on closures and adjustments, click here.
Surge continues: Migrant street releases could be coming to Pima County soon, due to a change in federal funding and the record number of people continuing to seek services in Tucson, Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara reports. With more than 25,800 migrants served in Pima County in October and likely more than 30,000 in November, the last six weeks have been a sustained surge like the county has never seen before, according to county spokesman Mark Evans. By the end of this year, the county will have served more migrants in 2023 than the previous four years combined.
No relief for now: Gov. Katie Hobbs says she doesn’t plan on sending National Guard troops to the Arizona-Mexico border in response to Customs and Border Protection’s closure of the Lukeville port of entry, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky reports. The port was closed indefinitely due to a migrant surge, with CBP redirecting manpower to address new arrivals. Hobbs didn’t rule out deploying the National Guard in the future, but said for now, the federal government needs to “step up and do its job.”
“This is a bad decision that impacts our border security,” Hobbs said of the current situation. “It hurts our economy, because it’s putting a damper on trade and tourism.”
204,000: The Tucson Agenda’s pageviews over its first five months.