When the first edition of the Tucson Agenda landed in your inboxes on July 4, 2023, it set us on an exciting adventure that we’re proud to say will reach its three-year mark this weekend.
At first, we’d send out regular updates on how the Agenda was doing, but those faded away as the novelty of being a new publication wore off. But milestones like our three-year anniversary are a good moment to take stock of what we’re doing and look to the horizon (where some dark clouds have us a little worried), as well as remind you who we are.
In a nutshell, we’re a handful of veteran local reporters who pull off the “daily miracle” of getting newsletters out the door five days a week.
We own and run the Tucson Agenda alongside our sister publication, the Arizona Agenda. We’re not beholden to billionaires, corporate executives or nonprofit foundations. Our only bosses, so to speak, are the paid subscribers who provide virtually all our revenue.
To all our paid subscribers: Thank you for giving us the chance to help build an ecosystem for local, independent news. We couldn’t do any of this without you.
To our free readers: We’ll keep trying to earn your subscription dollars every day as we cover local politics and government in Southern Arizona.
Looking back
The Agenda is a labor of love for us. We put in long hours because we believe in local journalism and we want it to thrive.
The way we see it, local journalism illuminates the civic world around you. It shows you how government works. It gives you a sense of who your elected officials actually are. It brings local political history and context to the forefront. Most of all, it helps you get informed so you can act with conviction.
And it’s really fun to make. Sure, it’s a stressful industry, but we have a great time writing our daily newsletters, always trying to be a little better than we were yesterday.
Since our last birthday, we’ve written 219 of those newsletters.
Each one has an originally reported news story and a curated news section (all told, we highlighted nearly 1,200 local news stories in the past year), along with our daily attempt to make you laugh about the latest political absurdity.
In the last year, we’ve helped readers track the ongoing saga of Sheriff Chris Nanos’ political troubles, the post-election debacle for U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, the kerfuffle over data centers like Project Blue, the new faces among Tucson and Pima County officials, and the looming threat of an ICE occupation, to name just a few of the countless local political and government stories.
Now we’re in the middle of an election season that will determine the future of Southern Arizona — as well as the gloriously childish shenanigans that come with political campaigns.
We can do all that because we hired Joe, who’s probably the hardest-working reporter in Tucson. The guy puts out a story basically every day. There are a lot of hard-working local reporters, but we’re not sure any of them matches what Joe does.
When you get down to it, how many other Southern Arizona news outlets are putting out as much original reporting as we do every day? We check every outlet each morning as we write our “In Other News” section, and the Agenda is right at the top of the list for consistent, daily reporting.
This has become the typical view of the Arizona Daily Star’s website over the past few months. It looks like a lot of reporting, but none of the bylines are from Star reporters.
We’re the worst business people, in a good way
While we like to think of ourselves as skilled journalists, we’re aware that we might be the worst business people you’ve ever met.
Our business model is: We try to make a great newsletter full of nuanced, solid reporting. Then, we give it all away for free.
And therein lies the crux of the money dilemma in journalism.
News is vital to democracy and should be considered a public good, just like roads, schools or police. But a sense of civic duty doesn’t pay for salaries, health insurance, freelancers, accountants or publishing costs.
Basically, news should be free for everybody. But somebody has to pay for it. (Right now, only 12% of local news readers across the country pay for local news.)
It’d make sense for us to put up a paywall or blanket our newsletters with ads, but we can’t bring ourselves to do either of those. Instead, we try to convince readers that the Agenda is valuable enough to pay for.
And that’s where some of those dark clouds we mentioned earlier pop up.
Simply put, we need more people to upgrade to paid subscriptions.
It’s not an emergency just yet, but it could be soon. If our numbers don’t pick up, this whole operation could blink out of existence.
We still get a lot of people signing up for free subscriptions. Usually, they read the daily newsletters for several months before they decide to support us financially.
That rhythm has an upside: By the time a free reader upgrades to a paid subscription, they know what we do and are convinced it’s worth their money. That means we don’t see a lot of people upgrading and then unsubscribing shortly after.
In fact, we keep an extraordinarily high percentage of readers from year to year (we also have a very respectable open rate every day).
But it also means the “runway” to paid subscriptions is very long. If all those free subscribers who read the Agenda every day upgraded to a paid subscription today, we’d have some financial breathing room and could maybe even hire another reporter.
Until then, we’re watching with growing anxiety as another one of those dark clouds looms on the horizon.
They’re the worst business people, in a bad way
Decades ago, newspapers shifted from being owned by families to being owned by corporations.
Now, we’re seeing an even more concerning shift from corporate-owned to billionaire-owned.
If you can stomach it, check out this list of ridiculously wealthy people buying up newspapers:
2007: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch buys the Wall Street Journal
2013: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post
2013: Hedge fund manager John Henry buys the Boston Globe
2014: Printing magnate Glen Taylor buys the Minnesota Star Tribune
2015: Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson buys the Las Vegas Review-Journal
2017: Apple founder Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs buys a majority share in The Atlantic
2018: Biotech pioneer Patrick Soon-Shiong buys the Los Angeles Times
2018: Salesforce founder Marc Benioff buys Time magazine
2024: Sinclair Broadcasting Group chair David Smith buys the Baltimore Sun
2025: Oracle founder Larry Ellison and his son David buy CBS News’ parent company (That isn’t a newspaper, but it’s part of the overall trend)
2026: The Ellisons are on the verge of buying CNN’s parent company.
That march toward a world of wealthy weirdos owning all your trusted news outlets hit close to home earlier this year.
A billionaire from Missouri, David Hoffmann, took over the company that runs the Arizona Daily Star in February, along with dozens of other newspapers across the country.
It’s his new play thing, which, as we previously reported, he may have bought out of spite because the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which is owned by the same company as the Star, didn’t write lovely puff pieces about his $100 million boondoggle in Missouri wine country.
That sends shivers down our spines, especially since the billionaire installed himself as chairman of the board. That’s not exactly a hands-off approach.
There’s nothing we can do about billionaires. All we can do is ask you to think about what the world would look like if billionaires completed their conquest of news media.
Then think about what the world would look like if every town and city had a bunch of small, independent news outlets staffed by veteran reporters.
If you’d rather have the latter, then we humbly ask you to show your support for the Agenda and click this button.
“He f**king licked my face”: In the days before Pima County Treasurer Brian Johnson resigned, Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher told him it was in his “best interest” to step down, the Tucson Sentinel’s Dylan Smith reports. Public records reveal Johnson was the subject of complaints of inappropriate sexual behavior from women working in his office, although Johnson told the Sentinel he and his girlfriend had a consensual “relationship” with a staffer. That staffer says he kept sending her suggestive emails, invited her to a couples massage and even texted her a nude photo of himself in a hot tub, long after she made clear she wasn’t interested in having a relationship with him. Johnson claims he was the victim of a coordinated plan by Lesher, Pima County Assessor Suzanne Droubie and the unnamed staffer to get him to resign. His claim loses some credibility as public records show Johnson gave copies of his self-published romance novel to three of his summer interns, one of whom was 15 years old at the time. Johnson is 70 years old.
How about applying that to the work week, too?: TUSD officials are considering a four-day school week, or maybe even having classes year-round, Noor Haghighi reports for Arizona Public Media. The district sent out a survey to parents last month (the survey stays open until August) to gauge their interest. For now, Palo Verde High School is the only school in the district using a four-day schedule, which school officials adopted earlier this year.
Not going as they hoped: The Trump administration’s plan to build a network of huge detention centers to aid its mass deportation program keeps showing signs of falling apart. Federal officials already said they planned to sell off the warehouses they bought in a rush late last year, and now ICE officials say they’re pushing pause on turning a warehouse in Surprise into a detention center, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. But it’s not a full stop, just a pause to conduct an environmental assessment, which satisfies one of the complaints from Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.
At long last: Construction began this week on the Cushing Street Skate Park, the first shaded skate park in Tucson, KGUN’s Vanessa Gongora reports. The man behind the project, Caleb Gutierrez, said he’s been pushing for the skate park since 2016. Last year, the Tucson City Council approved funding for the park, alongside donations from the Tohono O’odham Nation and Rio Nuevo, among other organizations. The park will be in the I-10 underpass on Cushing Street and officials expect it to be ready by the end of the year.
A blow to trans rights: Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act is expected to take effect after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld state restrictions on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports, Payton May reports for KOLD. The ruling allows Arizona’s 2022 law to move forward, after it had been temporarily blocked by a lawsuit. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said he will ask the court to remove the injunction so schools can begin enforcing the law. Attorneys with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights said they plan to keep challenging the Arizona case. Former Tucson volleyball player Grey Picciano, one of the original plaintiffs, said the decision was heartbreaking.
“They think we’re just trying to get that advantage, and we’re just trying to be who we are, we just want to be ourselves and be true to ourselves,” Picciano said.
It is not uncommon for there to be one person inside a political organization you need to win over to secure an endorsement.
But when it comes to one of Arizona Democrats' biggest LGBTQ+ political organizations — Stonewall Democrats of Arizona — there is literally just one person making that decision: Tucsonan Robert Rowley.
Rowley isn’t exactly a Democrat’s Democrat: He routinely posts vile, misogynistic and Islamophobic messages, and he once called Democratic Sen. Catherine Miranda a “c-nt,” per Lookout’s John Washington, who wrote a fascinating profile of Rowley. Members of the Democratic party told Lookout that they have been “physically threatened by him, including a throat-cutting gesture in front of a party member's child.”
Citing multiple Democratic insiders, Lookout reports that the organization "appears to have no designated structure for endorsements," leaving Rowley to pick the primary winners and losers. (He’s going big on Democratic Rep. Alma Hernandez in Tucson’s Legislative District 20 Senate race, over Rocque Perez, who is the only queer candidate in the race.)
At that point, they might as well rename it Stonewall Democrat of Arizona.