Agenda Takeover: The Tucson Agenda

(Re)Introducing ... The Tucson Agenda

We told you on Friday that while Hank takes a little time off, we’re going to turn over the Agenda to a few of our newsletter-slinging friends and let them introduce themselves. And of course, we gave our sister-newsletter, the Tucson Agenda, first crack.

Since launching on the Fourth of July, the Tucson Agenda has been crushing it, as you’ll see from this one-month business update, which they shared with their readers last Friday. The Tucson Agenda is our first attempt to expand into other niches and markets on our path to building a new kind of employee-owned statewide newsroom.

And they’re far outpacing where the Arizona Agenda was after one month in business, which is super exciting.

If you know a Southern Arizonan who would like a local version of the Agenda, with a Tucson twist, please be sure to forward this email to them.

Thanks as always for supporting the Arizona Agenda!

Friday marked one month since we launched the Tucson Agenda on the Fourth of July, and what an amazing month it’s been.

We’ve been having a blast! It’s so much fun that it sometimes doesn’t even feel like work, which is refreshing and such a privilege.

First of all, thank you. We couldn’t do any of this without you. And an extra big thank you to those of you who are choosing to support local journalism by paying for the Tucson Agenda, a sister publication of the Arizona Agenda.

We’re journalists, so it should come as no surprise that we’re big believers in transparency. And this feels like a great time to update you on what’s been going on behind-the-scenes, reflect on what we’ve learned, and take a moment to lay out what’s ahead.

Let’s start with some big-picture stuff

You really came through for us. We weren’t sure what to expect when we started the Tucson Agenda, but our paid subscribers have already put us on track for $41,000 in annual revenue.

This has kind of blown our minds. Still, it’s not nearly enough to pay both of us for a year, especially when you factor in the costs of paying Substack, taxes, and all the other expenses that come up.

We have almost 1,500 total subscribers, including nearly 360 who pay for their subscriptions. If all our free subscribers decided to pay for their subscriptions today, we could keep doing this forever. More realistically, we need to grow our total subscriber base by about 4X this year and maintain a strong paid-to-free ratio of subscribers, which we think is possible.

Our biggest hurdle is just letting people know we exist. But you’re our biggest asset on that front. Please take a moment to share the Tucson Agenda with your friends, family, coworkers and frenemies.

Better yet, buy someone a gift subscription!

Either way, if we can convince another 542 people that the Tucson Agenda is worth paying for, we’ll be set for the year as a 100% subscriber-funded publication. Now, wouldn’t that be cool?

Behind the scenes

This is really fun. Here’s what we’re loving the most:

Caitlin: This past month has been incredible and I wake up each day, excited to get to work. About a week after our launch, I realized that this is how I felt when I first became a reporter, before increasing corporate demands, shrinking resources and other factors sucked away a lot of the joy. This is the very best job and it feels great to get back to the basics and return our focus to journalism as a community service.

Curt: The last month has been remarkable in a bunch of ways, but what stands out most to me is that I get to write with my own voice. The writing style for a newsletter is kind of a mix of reporting (which I did for a decade or so) and opinion writing (which I did for about 18 months). Basically, we’re trying to get you the information you need, without boring you to tears. That’s a rare opportunity in the journalism world.

The struggle is real

It takes a lot of hustle to put out a daily newsletter, but we relish the freedom to pursue stories that interest us. There’s a ton of news out there and not nearly enough journalists in Southern Arizona to cover it all. There are days where we feel like kids in a candy store because there are so many good — and important — stories out there for us to pursue.

The other side of this is really hard. We both have experience with audience engagement and some other strategies that come with growing readership, but the business side of this is very new.

It feels weird and uncomfortable to constantly ask for money, but we want to keep doing this, so we’re pushing through. Anyway, click that button!

Designing a newsletter has also been a bit of a learning curve. We think we found a solid structure, but we don’t want to get too attached to it. The Tucson Agenda stole a lot of ideas that worked from our sister newsletter, the Arizona Agenda. But we want to continue to evolve into something more … Tucson. Caitlin is partial to some live events, restaurant and entertainment updates, while Curt would probably start a “Today in City Zoning” feature if he didn’t think it would bore you to death.

But we want to hear from you — what kind of feature would you like to see us take up regularly or semi-regularly?

The successes keep coming

We covered what we said we would cover. When we pitched the idea of the Tucson Agenda, we said we would focus on local government and what we called “government-adjacent” activity. We followed through on that promise. We wrote about the city council elections, campaign finance, local water policies, the city’s bus fleet, craziness at school board meetings, funding for local schools, rezoning, affordable housing, mental health services, and other local topics.

A lot of government officials read what we’re writing. County and city officials and their staff, employees with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, state lawmakers, members of Congress, and others subscribe. We also have local leaders, changemakers, educators and people who are actively working to better the community. We’re proud to have such an impressive subscriber base, and it’s been cool to see people sign up after we’ve written about them (that’s happened a lot.)

At least two-thirds of our subscribers open the newsletter every day and our 30-day open rate is nearly 70% — that’s huge! We also end up with more views of each newsletter than our number of total subscribers and our normal views are over 2,000 per newsletter. That says to us a lot of you are sharing the newsletter. Which is great!

What we’ve learned

People really are hungry for this type of news. The number of views each of our posts get and the reader engagement, in terms of likes and comments, tells us this. We’re looking for gaps in coverage to make sure you’re getting news from us that you can’t get anywhere else. There will be times that’s not the case (we aren’t going to sit out on an election) but we’re trying to work smarter, not harder, so that you benefit the most from reading our work.

Newsletters are freeing. We aren’t confined by newspaper space, rules, formats, etc., so we can play around with memes, tweets, and other images. We also can have a “take.” But we have to be wary of overstepping. A solid “here’s the deal” is invaluable to readers; a whiny “this is what pisses me off” is about as useful as an irate comment on a Facebook post.

We are not a newspaper and we aren’t going to try to turn into one. We have a newspaper in Tucson and it’s still a really good one. That’s not what you need us for, and we’re gong to continue to deliver a product that you want and need. But we still have found ourselves a few times trying to cover everything or break news before other outlets. Old habits die hard.

A lot of what needs to be reported isn’t rocket science, but reporters need time to do it. That means going through newsletters from city council members, memos from the county administrator, watching public meetings, tracking elected officials’ social media accounts, poring through public data, etc.

What’s ahead

We’re still hungry. We’ve come a long way in one month, but we’ve got a long way to go to become sustainable, so the fundraising work will continue. But we have a thousand other things we’d rather do.

We promised extras, and here they come. Now that we’re up and running and have a good rhythm, we’re ready to paid subscriber deliver the perks we talked about pre-launch. On Monday, our paid subscribers will find a podcast with Jill Jorden Spitz, former editor of the Arizona Daily Star. If you’ve been curious about what Jill is up to these days, you don’t want to miss this. Stay tuned for reader chats (we’ll be polling you for topics) and on August 27, we’re holding a live event at The Loft, with special guest David Fitzsimmons, former editorial cartoonist at the Star turned comrade in the Substack army.

We’ve got ideas. We’ll be reaching out to neighborhood associations to get a pulse on the issues our citizen groups are focusing their attention on, and we’ll be bringing you a local look at the upcoming legislative session. Caitlin has some solutions stories in the works and Curt is setting his sights on the November election.

You can’t escape housekeeping. Just like doing the dishes or vacuuming, some tasks are so easy to push off for another day. We have a lot of little items we need to take care of, such as tweaking our “About” page, that we’ll do in the next week or two.

And we’re pursuing new funding opportunities. We’re starting to establish advertising and partnership options to help bring in some additional revenue. We’ll keep it from becoming a distraction to the reader experience and we’ll keep it local and limited to causes and companies we believe in. If you’re interested in supporting local journalism and generating buzz for your business, nonprofit or group, hit us up! Info@tucsonagenda.com.

Thanks again for reading and supporting our work. We work for you, so reply to any of our newsletters to talk to us

—Caitlin and Curt, Tucson Agenda