The Daily Agenda: Time flies when you’re having fun

We had a big jump in subscribers … We’re trying out new features … Replacing Heeke might not be easy.

And just like that, another month has flown by. Believe it or not, the Tucson Agenda has been publishing for seven months.

We skipped our monthly update in January, since we took time off for the holidays, but a lot has happened in two months and we’ve welcomed a whole bunch of new readers to the Agendaverse.

Since our last update in early December, we’ve added more than 500 new subscribers and we’re now closing in on 3,200. For those of you who are new, we’ve been running monthly updates to give you a look behind the curtain.

And to our 600 paid subscribers, thank you so much for your support! We are funded almost entirely by subscriptions and you’ve put us two-thirds of the way to being sustainable. 

A lot of our growth came after we broke a big story about the University of Arizona’s financial crisis and ran a follow-up story about the reaction on campus. 

After we broke the story that the UA had in fact retained its ousted chief financial officer, we decided to lean into all our questions and start asking for public records. We’re still waiting on several of our requests to be filled, but we’ve already written two stories about the salary data and contract information we received and we have more in the works.

And since UA officials have admitted that the athletic department is one of the three main factors contributing to the financial crisis, we’ve started looking into what’s happening over there, including the impact on student-athletes.

We’ll continue to chase this story and we’re thankful to those of you who have sent in ideas for records to request and questions to ask.

Election season is upon us (really, is it never not election season anymore?) so we have a whole new slate of local elections and we’ve already started covering them. Whether it’s races for county supervisor, school boards, or the county attorney, we’re keeping you ahead of the game. 

We’re also keeping tabs on our local legislators and explaining how Tucson readers can make sense of what the Legislature is doing. 

What’s new?

It’s only a month into the new year and we’ve already added several new and regular features to our coverage. Every other Monday, you can find briefs about what local and state officials are discussing in meetings, and we’ve also added coverage from meetings in South Tucson and Marana, thanks to our student intern, Sam Parker.

Keep an eye out for news from Oro Valley and our local schools, and if you haven’t checked out our Instagram lately, our intern Desarae Tucker has been hard at work introducing a younger audience to the Tucson Agenda.

We also introduced readers to another new feature this month, The Climate Agenda, with a story about the Los Reales Sustainability Campus. We’ve written a lot about climate and sustainability issues since we launched and wanted to make sure subscribers could easily identify those stories.

In December, we rolled out letters to the editor and after a smattering of letters early on, we haven’t received very many. That could have something to do with launching it right before the holidays, but regardless, we’re going to change how we do it so we get more letters and make sure the ones we do get actually run in the Agenda.

We’ll start running individual letters, instead of waiting to have enough to run a batch together. A few people wrote letters recently that met our standards, but didn’t get published because we didn’t have enough for a batch. We apologize for that. We’re also now accepting letters from all subscribers, not just those of you who pay, as we originally said in our guidelines. You can send your letters to Curt at curt@tucsonagenda.com.

Out and about

Caitlin’s solutions-focused community book club (in partnership with the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona and Tucson Tome Gnome) continues to be well-attended, with more than 30 Tucsonans showing up for our January meeting.

In March, we’ll be discussing John Vailant’s “Fire Weather” and will have a pre-discussion panel of experts to discuss local climate and sustainability action. We’ll tell you more about the panelists as we get closer, but you can catch Vailant at the Tucson Festival of Books the weekend before, where he’ll appear on several panels.

Speaking of the Tucson Festival of Books, both Curt and Caitlin are moderating panels and will be hanging out at the festival in our Tucson Agenda gear, so keep an eye out for us (we’ll have stickers!) We’d love to meet you and thank you for your support.

But back to January. Caitlin was a guest on KJZZ’s The Show to talk about our story about the UA’s ousted CFO, and last Saturday, she and our intern Liv Leonard participated in a social innovation hackathon to brainstorm solutions to homelessness. (You can read more about that Friday.)

Curt spent an afternoon with members of the Rincon Rotary Club and in a few weeks, you can catch us both on the Bill Buckmaster Show roundtable.

We’re always interested in talking to local groups, so if you’re part of a neighborhood association, a political party, or any other civic-minded group, please feel free to reach out to caitlin@tucsonagenda.com or curt@tucsonagenda.com.

Some friendly advice: Longtime Arizona Daily Star sports columnist Greg Hansen points out that replacing departing University of Arizona Athletic Director Dave Heeke could be a “problematic, long-haul search.” Hansen questions what qualified athletic director would agree to come to the UA amidst its current financial chaos and damaged reputation. He says the hiring process should include outside input, offering four key players UA President Robert C. Robbins should consult.

Rallying the troops: Roughly 150 UA union and community members held a protest Monday at the administration building, fighting against layoffs and denouncing campus leaders for mismanaging the school's finances, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar reports. United Campus Workers of Arizona spokeswoman and UA staffer Maria Sohn Hasman said the group had received reports of layoffs through its online survey and were able to confirm at least 30. 

“The university has not mandated any layoffs. These are usually decisions made at the college or unit level,” said Pam Scott, UA’s associate vice president of external communications.

Bright futures: Twenty-four UA students who were awarded research grants presented their projects last week during the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute’s first ever showcase, the Daily Wildcat’s Caitlyn Murphy writes. The students were awarded grants in one of four areas and featured students in disciplines ranging from anthropology to linguistics to gender and women’s studies. Organizers say the showcase had been a dream of the directors for more than a decade.

Border bashing: Migrant-aid groups and volunteers on the Southern Arizona border have seen an uptick in confrontations with armed vigilantes and right-wing propagandists, the Star’s Emily Bregel reports. The propagandists are posting videos that falsely accuse volunteers of working with traffickers, terrorists and Mexican organized crime, with some of the videos netting millions of views. Researchers say an anti-government convoy that visited multiple border sites last week has invigorated extremists, as has racist rhetoric from conservative politicians.

Change of plans: The City of Tucson and Pima County may end up paying damages for the decades that Louis Taylor spent in prison in connection with the 1970 Pioneer Hotel Fire, KVOA”s Chorus Nylander reports. Taylor spent 42 years in prison before making a deal in 2013 to plead no contest in exchange for the Pima County Attorney’s Office setting aside his original conviction and giving him credit for time served. Taylor is suing the city and county alleging prosecutor misconduct, racial biases and more. His no-contest plea limited his ability to seek damages, but a judge said in January that Taylor can receive damages if the jury finds ample cause. A settlement conference is scheduled for later this month.

Filling a need: A UA initiative that started as one student’s passion project has grown into a widely used service that provides free clothing to students and staff members, the DW’s Sierra Blaser writes. Campus Closet is located in the Student Union Memorial Center and collects new and used professional, business and casual clothing items, typically those that can be used for interviews and professional events. Created in 2018 by UA student Kayla Randolph, the organization aims to address the problem that qualified people are less likely to get a job if they don’t have the resources to look professional.

500,000: The number of pageviews the Tucson Agenda will reach in a few days. Not bad for a small publication that launched just seven months ago.