The Daily Agenda: Those awkward teenage years

The Agenda is growing up ... But not too much ... Tucson has a new genius.

Our baby is growing up.

The Tucson Agenda just wrapped up its third month of publication. Hooray! We’ve come a long way in such a short time and we’re super excited to keep going.

At the end of each month, we update you about what we've been doing and take stock of the endeavor itself. We also like to come up with a shorthand to describe the feel of each month. It’s just a fun way to keep track of the Agenda’s growth.

Our first month felt like climbing a mountain and our second month was more like a whirlwind. Now we’re entering what feels like an adolescent phase.

We’re setting aside some things that worked for us before, but not so much anymore. We’re also experimenting with new things to see what fits us best.

It’s all part of the Agenda maturing. That means being more methodical and doing things, big and small, to make the Agenda better.

But like any good teenager, we’re still not above doing stuff for a laugh.

Let’s start with some changes you might’ve noticed in our newsletters.

We're starting to experiment with new writing forms, like satire and Q and A. Both of those were extremely popular with our readers. We're also leaning more into other forms that we used occasionally before, like explainers.

The Agenda now features younger voices, including our UA intern, Kyra Berg, and students in Caitlin’s reporting public affairs class.

You may have seen some cosmetic changes, too.

We stopped bolding the first sentence of every paragraph. That's the style used by many newsletters, but after a while we found it distracting.

We shifted how we do our pitches -- the little green buttons we put in the body of each newsletter. Instead of asking our free subscribers to upgrade to a paid subscription, we're asking you all to share the newsletter. 

We’re also experimenting with how we engage with readers. We included a "leave a comment" prompt at the bottom of one of our newsletters, which led to a lively discussion with readers.

That’s something we’d like to do more, particularly with topics that every Tucsonan has a say in, like a proposed salary increase for the mayor and council. 

Behind-the-scenes, our workflow is getting ironed out and we're able to plan our stories better.

We continue to use our expertise to cover stories, like the scandal at the shreiff’s department or the tug-of-war over border-related funding between New York and Arizona.

As we look at the Agenda’s numbers, a big bright spot for us is we passed 2,000 subscribers. That’s just wonderful!

We’re up to 460 people who decided to support us financially with a paid subscription. We can’t thank you enough. Every cent stays right here in Tucson and helps us put out the best journalism we can.

Over the past three months, our newsletters have been read more than 180,000 times. That tells us our readers like what we’re writing and look forward to opening our newsletters every morning.

When we first started out, we asked people who know about subscriptions and revenue what we should expect. They told us if we were any good we'd see an initial spike, but then we'd grow more gradually.

In other words, we should expect to hit a plateau and stay there for a while. 

We're on that plateau now. It's somewhat nerve-wracking, to be candid. But our paid subscribers did us a solid over the first two months and we have enough money to cover us as we work to earn more paid subscriptions.

Our biggest obstacle remains getting the word out about what we’re doing. 

That includes physically getting out into the community and telling people who we are and what we’re doing, and we’re starting to do more of that.

Caitlin, representing the Agenda, co-hosted the third meeting of the Solutions-Focused Community Book Club, a collaboration with the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona and Tucson Tome Gnome.

Around 50 people — including Tucson City Councilman Kevin Dahl — showed up to discuss this month’s book, which focused on ways to support one another and build community.

We like getting out in the community and making ourselves known, so look for us at upcoming events focusing on the future of Tucson’s housing market, community safety, poverty and pretrial justice reform.

As for what's in the pipeline, we're hammering out an editorial policy. That's kind of like the deal a publication makes with its readers. For example, how do we handle conflicts of interest? Or how do we attribute facts to sources? 

Both of us have been reporters for a long time, so the answers to those kinds of questions are obvious to us. But it's important to make them explicit, particularly as new readers arrive and wonder who we are and whether they can trust us. 

In the same vein as explainers, we’re thinking about highlighting more informational tools that are available to the public, such as the medical examiner’s data dashboards or the City of Tucson’s plan to gather better demographic information.

We’ve still got a lot to learn and we remember how long and drawn out those adolescent years feel when you’re in them.

But they’re also fun, exciting years full of possibility. We intend to seize every chance we get to make the Agenda something special.

Let us know what you’d like to see by leaving a comment.

New genius in town: University of Arizona English professor Manuel Muñoz has been awarded a MacArthur genius grant for his fiction that depicts "with empathy and nuance the Mexican American communities of California’s Central Valley,” the Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith writes. The fellowship comes with an $800,000 no-strings grant over five years. Muñoz has been a UA professor since 2008.¹

A never-ending story: The saga of the more than 300 small animals that went missing after their transfer to the Humane Society of Southern Arizona continues, with Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara reporting that the board is making inaccurate statements. After the incident was first reported, the unvetted family to whom the pets were given returned 63 of the animals. The board said Saturday the animals were returned healthy, but volunteers who cared for them say many arrived with medical issues.

Tragedy remembered The UA is hosting a public memorial service today from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. to honor Thomas Meixner, the hydrology professor who was fatally shot on campus one year ago today, the Daily Wildcat’s JT Thorpe writes. The event will be held at the St. Thomas More Catholic Newman Center, with a livestreamed service scheduled for noon. The gathering is non-denominational, but the Newman Center will hold its daily mass to honor Meixner at about 5 p.m.

Revenue down: The Sept. 25 closure of one of Nogales’ border gates has already led to a drop in sales and customers on the Arizona side, the Nogales International’s Angela Gervasi reports. The Morley Gate was closed for infrastructural improvements, but its absence leaves border crossing travelers with fewer options to cross from Sonora into Arizona. The closure is scheduled to last until late November.

Language barrier: The mother of a one-month-old Mexican girl who died near Nogales last month says the responding Border Patrol agent couldn’t understand her requests for help, the Arizona Republic’s José Ignacio Castañeda Perez reports. The 16-year-old mother told the agent her daughter was almost dead and needed a hospital, but the agent later reported that he didn’t know the infant was in distress until they arrived at the station, where there was a Spanish-speaking agent. The infant was seen by medical personnel before being taken to the hospital, where she ultimately died.

We hope you'll talk to your friends about us and consider upgrading, of course, but right now our focus has shifted to reaching as many people as possible.

60: The number of submissions to the City of Tucson’s Casita Model Plan Design Competition. A jury will evaluate each design using scoring guidelines, but community members can review submissions and select their top three choices through a public survey, which is available until Oct. 22. Selected designs will be announced in early November. ²

1. Caitlin was lucky enough to take a class with Manuel Muñoz for her creative writing minor while she was in journalism school.

2. Thanks to reader Brian S. for suggesting this number of the day!