The Daily Agenda: We're two months old!
We've got green lights across the board ... Looking forward to another month ... Criticism of city judges comes to Tucson City Council.
Our first month felt like climbing a mountain. Our second month felt more like a whirlwind.
We started the Tucson Agenda without knowing whether it would work. We could see it had worked with the Arizona Agenda’s focus on statewide politics, but it was anybody’s guess whether a Tucson version would get enough traction.
We had to build it from the ground up and hope for the best.
Within a few weeks, we realized that, yes, it does work. Plenty of people want news about their local government and enough of them are willing to pay to read that news, at least enough to buy us a few months’ time.
That’s kind of how we measure revenue: how much time it buys us to keep reporting on Tucson’s political scene. We’ll keep doing it for as much time as we can buy.
Now that we’re off and running, what we’ve found is there are more newsworthy items than we have time to report.
That’s the type of problem reporters love to have. There is so much reporting that needs to be done. And we’re not just talking about shenanigans and corruption. Simply showing Tucsonans what their elected officials are doing — the good, the bad, and everything in between — is a full-time job.
Did we say full-time job? We meant, “Wake up every morning with a grin and rush to the computer to see if we have more subscribers and then get cracking on doing what we need to do to get more subscribers.”
But it’s really fun and we can feel momentum building. Just last week, we realized we had reported enough that we had built an archive.
And we’re starting to see stories develop enough for us to revisit them, which is a practice that has kind of atrophied in the news business.
Both of us are naturally curious people, so we’ve enjoyed getting to poke around in different areas of local government and see how public money is spent.
Last month, we checked in on the commission evaluating the need for a new jail, a proposed change to the state’s public records law, services provided to crime victims, rain measurements, domestic abuse hotlines, building codes, plastic recycling, and water use in toilets, among other topics.
There’s never a dull moment at the Tucson Agenda, as long as your kind of fun involves nerdy government stuff.
As we did last month, we’d like to update you on what’s been going on behind-the-scenes, reflect on what we’ve learned, and take a moment to talk about what’s ahead.
We’re still amazed at the outpouring of financial support. We are on track for nearly $53,000 in annual revenue, thanks to almost $11,000 in new subscriptions in our second month.
All we need to do is add a zero to that $12,000 and the Tucson Agenda will be sustainable. Even better, we could add a zero to that $53,000. Just sayin’.
Every morning, two-thirds of our subscribers read our newsletter, which is phenomenal.
And every day, about 10 more people subscribe. We added about 330 subscribers last month. That helped our pageviews grow enough to pass 125,000 since we started.
As we mentioned in last month’s update, one of the things both of us are learning how to do is promote the Tucson Agenda. It doesn’t come naturally, but it’s necessary.
Curt went on Arizona Public Media’s The Buzz radio show to talk about campaign finance and Caitlin was on KXCI’s Broad Perspectives.
Caitlin also picked up some awards from the Arizona Newspapers Association.
We also invited in a guest writer and were thrilled that Liliana López Ruelas wrote about the shutting down of the Arizona Daily Star’s La Estrella de Tucsón.
She wrote the piece for us in both English and Spanish, and the English version has netted the most page views of anything we’ve posted. More than 3,100 people have read her story in English, and another 71 in Spanish.
That tells us we should continue integrating different voices and outlooks into our coverage, so that’s what we plan to do.
It’ll take some work. We’ll need time to build trust and relationships with a lot of different people.
We held an event at The Loft Cinema on Aug. 27 with Hank Stephenson of the Arizona Agenda and emceed by David Fitzsimmons. Nearly 100 people turned out and they asked some good questions.
We love hearing from our readers and rest assured, we think carefully about what you tell us, whether at a live event, an email, or a comment on the Daily Agenda.
As always, thanks for reading and supporting our still-new venture. We couldn’t do any of this without you, particularly our paid subscribers. You’ve bought us enough time that we can say, with quite a bit of confidence, we’ll be back with another update next month.
Did we mention we’d appreciate it if you upgraded to a paid subscription? Either way, we’re happy to keep peppering our newsletters with corny jokes.
No initiative, no pamphlet: Voters in Vail won’t get a publicity pamphlet when they cast their ballots in November to decide whether they should incorporate, County Administrator Jan Lesher wrote in an Aug. 30 memo to the Board of Supervisors. Vail residents had been asking Supervisor Steve Christy about the pamphlets, but because the election does not involve a ballot initiative, the county won’t send out the pamphlets.
Worth considering: The Tucson City Council shouldn’t wave away criticism of city judges when it comes time for the council to reappoint them, Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes. They brushed off the recommendation of an oversight commission to not reappoint Magistrate Geraldine Hale in 2021 and now they’re faced with a similar decision with Presiding Magistrate Antonio Riojas.
“They have shown an unwillingness to accept bad news about judges they like and have appointed before. The big legal issues raised by the commission seem to disintegrate when forced into the political arena of the council chambers,” Steller writes.
Hear from your lawmakers: Two state legislators who represent the Tucson area shared their thoughts on this year’s legislative session with the Tucson Sentinel. Reps. Nancy Gutierrez and Christopher Mathis answered questions about what the Legislature accomplished, missed opportunities, and overlooked issues.
Streams lose protection: A new environmental rule will lift federal protections on ephemeral streams, which account for most river miles in Arizona, and ease the way for projects like the Copper World mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, the Star’s Tony Davis reports.
Funding dispute: Governors have been sending migrants to cities like New York and Denver, which earned headlines and created a logistical headache. Now, the federal government is sending money that was initially meant for organizations in border states, such as the Casa Alitas shelter in Tucson, to cities far from the U.S.-Mexico border, KOLD’s Andrew Capasso reports.
“Instead, the resulting funding redirection will result in greatly decreased capacity for the border NGOs, which in turn will result in shelters not being able to receive all of the people being processed and released by DHS agencies,” Teresa Cavendish, executive director of Casa Alitas, said.
Watch out for that dust: Recent dust storms in Arizona are putting people at risk of valley fever, a serious lung infection, the Arizona Republic’s Abigail Celaya reported. John Galgiani, the director of the University of Arizona’s Valley Fever Center for Excellence and director of Banner University Health Valley Fever Program, said 50% of valley fever infections nationwide come from Maricopa County. The good news is the UA discovered a vaccine to protect dogs, which could be available next year, and potentially humans from valley fever.
280,000: That’s how many pounds of food the University of Arizona’s student-run Campus Pantry supplies per year to people on campus facing food insecurity, KGUN’s Kenny Darr reported.