The Daily Agenda: Taking stock of our time

We’re ten months old! ... Audits aren’t always a pain … County candidates get the boot.

This time last year, the Tucson Agenda was just an idea and we never imagined that almost 3,800 community members would sign on to support our work.

After our launch, we started running monthly updates for readers, providing an inside look at the business side of the Agenda. After a while, it started to feel like those were a little too frequent and got in the way of our regular reporting. But since many of you have made an investment in the Agenda, we still want to keep you informed about our finances, readership and more, so we’re switching our updates to a quarterly basis.

We spent a lot of our time this spring reflecting on what we’ve done and what’s next for the Agenda and just wrapped up the Local Independent Online News Publishers’ sustainability audit. This was a fascinating process that challenged us to ask hard questions about our business model and future and paired us with an industry expert who evaluated our performance in a number of areas.

As part of the audit, Caitlin spent a few hours talking with Daniel Petty, ProPublica’s director of audience strategy, who previously worked at a handful of newspapers, including the Denver Post.

We think Daniel was a perfect choice to help us guide the Agenda, since he has a similar background to ours. And ProPublica’s audience engagement strategies are top-notch (Caitlin previously consulted with ProPublica on just that when she developed her solutions beat at the Arizona Daily Star.) 

Daniel said that we have momentum and are fulfilling an important need with our reporting while growing our financial resources. Now, it’s time for us to learn more about our existing and potential audiences and understand where we should expand.

“Tucson Agenda has more support than most early state local news startups,” Daniel wrote in our audit report. “To continue to grow, the organization will need to figure out how to scale reporting.”

Daniel said that our strengths lie in our quality, in-depth reporting and robust reporting schedule and said our best bet to increase our audience and revenue is by exploring our ability to publish multiple stories in a single day.

That’s the goal, and we’re already hitting the point where we don’t have enough space for all the stories we’re writing. That’s a good thing, but it presents us with some choices about how to get more news into a newsletter that has limited space, so stay tuned for some experimentation.

And with the addition of our new, part-time reporter Susan Barnett to our team, we’ll have even more news to report and we’re also hoping to add other new voices to the mix through some regular freelance contributors. We’ll share details about that soon.

But first, Susan is hosting a listening session at American Eat Co. on Friday and will hopefully get some input from readers and community members that will help shape her reporting on elections through the lens of Hispanic voters. If you can’t make it Friday, Susan will be back at American Eat Co. Monday from 4 to 7 p.m. and she’ll be posted up at a few other spots around town later this month.

Caitlin and Curt will be there too for moral support, so look for us in our Agenda shirts and come grab a sticker.

And when it comes to increasing our coverage, we want your input there, too. We regularly write about local government, politics, climate and sustainability, and efforts to improve Tucsonans’ quality of life, but what else do you want to read more about? Local schools and trends in education? Child welfare? Transportation? Business? Housing?

Send us a note at caitlin@tucsonagenda.com and let us know what you’d like to see more of in the Agenda.

We said goodbye to our first group of Jamieson-Metcalf Scholars this week and couldn’t be happier with their work. During their time with the Agenda, Sam Parker and Liv Leonard wrote about important issues that impact the community, including a loan program helping South Tucson residents remain in their homes, a University of Arizona course and mentorship that supports Indigenous high schoolers, Pima County’s smaller towns’ thoughts about the Regional Transportation Authority, the untimely return of a campus troll to the UA, Oro Valley’s decision to take on its own tourism marketing and quite a few briefs about local school boards and town councils.

They covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and we’re proud of their work and grateful for their help. We’re also thankful to UA alum Bill Jamieson for funding the fellowship. We also want to thank our social and multimedia intern Desarae Tucker for launching our TikTok account and working to connect students and young voters with the Agenda.

We’ll soon be welcoming new student interns to our ranks and are excited to tell you about that when we’ve finalized details.

Caitlin is still hosting her solutions-focused community book club with the Tucson Tome Gnome and Community Foundation for Southern Arizona and the next meeting is just a few weeks away. On May 23, the group will be discussing “Disability Visibility,” edited by Alice Wong, and will be joined by a panel of local experts. If you haven’t been to a meeting yet, this is a great time to start. Find details and RSVP here.

And while Tucson is getting ready to enter another long, hot summer, we think there’s still plenty to celebrate. Mark your calendars for the evening of Friday, July 12 when we’ll be throwing a party celebrating our first year in business. We’ll start rolling out details soon, but join us for food, drinks, great company and the opportunity to win some cool Tucson Agenda swag.

We wouldn’t be here without your support and we’d love the chance to say “Thank you” in person. We hope you can join us and celebrate all that we’ve accomplished together in our first year. Stay tuned for more about our party in upcoming weeks.

Speaking of July, the primary election will be here before you know it and we’ve been providing regular coverage about local candidates and campaign finance reports.

This Saturday, Curt will be moderating the Democrats of Greater Tucson’s District 1 Pima County Supervisor Debate. He’ll also moderate the Legislative District 17 debate on May 24 for the Citizens Clean Elections Commission.

We’ll keep you posted on future debates and campaign events so you have plenty of opportunities to hear from the candidates and have your questions answered.

Speaking of questions being answered, we’ve already learned a lot from Agenda readers who filled out our reader survey. If you noticed us putting more captions on the photos and graphics we use, that’s because of a request a reader made in the survey.

And we made a graphic for local government briefs with photos of the Tucson City Council and Pima County Board of Supervisors after we heard from readers who didn’t really know their elected officials (plus, Curt recently discovered Canva and can’t stop using it).

We’ll keep incorporating your suggestions, and we’d love to hear more of them from you. If you take a few minutes to fill out our reader survey, you’ll help us get to know you better and make the Agenda better. 

We want to grow the Tucson Agenda and make it bigger and better, but we can’t do this work without your support. If you’re not already paying for your subscription, now is a great time to join the nearly 700 other people who are.

Bye bye, ban: The Arizona Senate voted yesterday to repeal the state’s 160-year-old law regulating abortion, the Arizona Republic’s Ray Stern writes. The repeal bill passed by a vote of 16-14, with Republican Sen. Shawnna Bolick and Senate President Pro Tempore T.J. Shope siding with Democratic lawmakers. Gov. Katie Hobbs said she’d sign the repeal as soon as it lands on her desk, but it won’t take effect until 90 days after the last day of the legislative session, which has yet to be determined. It’s possible the repeal won’t take effect until late September.

Thinning the pack: Several Pima County candidates are no longer on the ballot due to legal challenges to their nominating petitions, the Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel writes. As a result, the constable race in Justice Precinct 9 has no candidates, opening the door for write-in candidates in the July 30 Primary Election. In Legislative District 18, Democrat Matt Welch withdrew his challenge against incumbent state Sen. Priya Sundareshan, after she filed a lawsuit challenging his signatures. And in Congressional District 6, Libertarian candidates Clifford Vance Cast and Mark Siarto also withdrew their candidacies due to legal challenges. 

Law and disorder: Law enforcement officers in gas masks and riot gear stormed a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus at about 2 a.m. Wednesday and arrested four students, Arizona Public Media’s Hannah Cree writes. The situation escalated after the 10:30 p.m. deadline for protesters to leave the area, when University of Arizona police officers were joined by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and the Arizona Department of Public Safety to help deal with the crowd of several hundred protesters. 

Plenty of fish in the lake: The Canoa Ranch lake was stocked by the Arizona Game and Fish Department Tuesday with more than 100 protected, native roundtail chub, the Green Valley News’ Brianna McCord writes. The fish were collected from Bureau of Land Management traps set at Las Cienegas National Conservation Area near Sonoita. Competition from non-native fish and habitat loss have led to decreases in the roundtail chub population, with the lake’s new fish joining a refugee population in the hopes of establishing a new, secondary population of Gila chub.

Community connections: The Community Food Bank in Nogales is hosting monthly, free “Cafecito and Conversation” events which aim to connect people with local resources and learning opportunities, the Nogales International’s Daisy Zavala Magaña reports. Many of the workshops also further the group’s goal of saving fresh produce from ending up in the landfill by teaching residents how to conserve and preserve foods. Sessions are held on the third Thursday of every month.

Visa updates: The Department of Homeland Security is making changes to its T visa program, which provides special visas for non-U.S. citizens who are victims of sex or labor trafficking, KJZZ’s AlisaReznick reports. The new rules go into effect in August and include updated definitions for terms like abuse and self-harm, clarifies requirements for evidence and reporting and makes it easier for law enforcement to act on reports.

67.3: April’s average temperature, the coolest since 2010, according to the National Weather Service in Tucson.