A peek inside our newsroom

Hey readers,

As we mentioned earlier today, it's Local News Day.

🎉 Yay! 🎉

We thought that would be a fun opportunity to give you a little behind-the-scenes insight into how today’s editions came together.

We had two banger editions today (if we do say so ourselves) across the Arizona Agenda and the Tucson Agenda.

And it took the whole Agenda team pulling together to get those done.

So what's a day in the life of a reporter look like?

Well, the Arizona Agenda’s story about Republican Rep. Matt Gress started about a month ago, when our education reporter, Jessica Votipka, was finishing an interview about something totally unrelated.

Like any good reporter, she always closes interviews with some version of, “What else is happening that I should know about?”

The source tipped her off that they heard Gress is a registered lobbyist in multiple states.

That's not exactly an education beat story (even though Gress is chair of the House Education Committee), so she flagged the tip for Hank, who went searching through lobbyist registration databases in other states. He was able to verify that, yeah, look at that, Gress is a registered lobbyist in four states.

Jessica started writing up the article. And she called Gress several times to try to give him a chance to comment. But the story stalled because Gress wouldn't call her back.

So TJ cornered Gress at the state House and got those great quotes about “there won’t be any follow-up answers.”

Nicole had already been stewing on a story about how many lawmakers are “consultants” on the side. And she had already analyzed the financial disclosure statements from lawmakers and built a spreadsheet.

So she whipped out that follow-up piece about the lawmakers and their questionable consulting gigs.

Curt took the lead on coordinating among Jessica, Joe and Nicole while he was cranking out items for “In Other News.” And Hank handled the “Laugh” sections about Rodney Glassman’s email and the Pima County employee survey, the headers for both publications about Local News Day, and the segment asking for submissions for the debates we’re moderating this year for the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission.

Meanwhile, in Tucson, Joe caught a breaking news story that former city council member Rocque Perez was challenging Democratic Rep. Alma Hernandez’s candidacy in her bid to become a state senator.

It was a pretty complicated story, and Hank had just done a fair amount of research on the law at the heart of the challenge — thanks to the failed lawsuit against Republican Rep. Walt Blackman that was filed a week or two earlier. So Hank hopped in to help Joe wrap that up and add some context and history to the breaking news.

Because Hank was busy, Nicole and TJ got dragged into scanning the ~100+ news sources we look at every day to find the most important political stories and finish writing the “In Other News” section for both publications.

We still didn't have news from the Salt River Project election as of our deadline, so Hank was on call late to squeeze in that final nugget.

And when his phone started ringing after 8 p.m., he couldn't resist throwing in one more “In Other News” item about Cartwright Elementary School District Superintendent Steve Watson’s surprise resignation from what we once called “Arizona’s most dysfunctional school board.” (FWIW, we’re already hearing gossip that Watson may be getting a job at the Tolleson school district.)

Our first editorial meeting is at 9:00 a.m. We finally put the email to bed at about 10 p.m. yesterday.

And Curt is up at 5 a.m. to give both emails one final fact-checking and copy-editing pass before they land in your inbox at 6 a.m.

By 8 a.m., our phones are blowing up with reactions from readers (and today, they were good reactions, which is nice!)

And that's a pretty standard day for us.

That's how the news comes together. It’s a business that runs on long days and a high tolerance for chaos.

Our team spends most of their waking hours talking to sources, scrambling after tips, chasing politicians, researching, checking facts and tapping on keyboards to nail down the various bits and pieces of this daily email.

We hope you appreciate our work.

And we hope you’ll consider subscribing or sharing today's editions as part of Local News Day.

We’re an independent local political journalism outfit — and that means we rely on you, our readers, to spread the word, support our work and keep us in business.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.