Happy birthday to us!
Happy birthday to us!
You're our biggest reason to celebrate.
As we look back on the last 12 months, our second year as small business owners and truly independent journalists, we have a lot to celebrate.
It was a big year for the Agenda and for us personally. We more than doubled our total readership in our second year, going from about 4,500 total subscribers on our last birthday to just over 9,000 as of this week. That’s pretty amazing! And our paid subscriber rate remained strong throughout.
Rachel had her first baby — a boy! And the Arizona Agenda got a little sister — the Tucson Agenda!
We’re throwing a party later this month in Tucson to celebrate our anniversary and the Tucson Agenda’s successful launch. We’d love to see you there.
Join us on Sunday, August 27 at 3 p.m. at The Loft Cinema for a live event with the Agenda crew and legendary cartoonist David Fitzsimmons. We’re gonna swap some journalism war stories as he cartoons lucky folks in the audience. It’ll be fun!
In our second year, the awards and accolades kept piling up.
Rachel was named Journalist of the Year by the Arizona Press Club — the judges cited the “breadth, quality and variety of her work” — among a host of other awards that she and Hank took home from the organization. The Phoenix New Times declared us Phoenix’s best newsletter, and Phoenix Magazine agreed, calling us the best Substack in the Valley.
But it’s the awards you readers bestowed that mean the most to us.
New media and legacy outlets like the Republic and Axios wrote about us, and we were invited to write for national and international publications like the Guardian, Politico, Washington Post and Votebeat. We hosted debates for the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, did countless TV and radio appearances talking about politics, elections and public policy and spoke to dozens of civic groups throughout the year.
And we shared the love with other great reporters and Twitterati.
We covered what we wanted.
As independent journalists without bosses, corporate overlords or anyone else interfering, we were able to just focus on the things that were interesting to us. Luckily, you readers seem to be into the same kind of stuff.
In the last year, we kept you in the loop through all the madness of the 2022 election and post-election denial period. Our cheat sheets to help you fill out your ballots were incredibly popular. We even heard from nonpolitical friends that they had stumbled onto our work and found it immensely useful when filling out their ballots.
And we delivered the lowdown on the Capitol in 2023, with a brand new Republican-majority Legislature, and Democrats in control of most of Arizona’s top statewide elected offices. We offered some sobering assessments of on Gov. Katie Hobbs’ priorities and accomplishments, broke down who and what exactly is in a governor’s cabinet, and interviewed members of the new team, for starters.
We got to know the new faces at the Capitol through our Meet a New Lawmaker interview series, and kept you abreast of the latest legislation in our Bill of the Day section. We served up deep-dives into the hot topics like housing policy, abortion, water and education funding. And we looked back on past eras of split governance in Arizona, and explained the history of Arizona’s weirdest bipartisan political bromance.
We got to work with our friends.
It’s thrilling to be able to bring new people like Caitlin and Curt into the fold with the Tucson Agenda. It takes a village to put together this little newsletter. Even before he was working on the Tucson Agenda project, Curt was contributing here, talking about leaving the Daily Star’s opinion page and the end of Title 42 at the border.
He’s one of a long cast of freelance friends we hired this year. Reporter Evan Wyloge told us about self-driving cars, lobbyist Gaelle Esposito explained how to better cover trans issues, historian Donna Reiner broke down the eerily familiar contours of the 1916 election, and photographer Caitlin O’Hara spent the day with Rachel at an abortion clinic that was struggling through legally uncertain times.
We even paid an artist friend to doodle on some congressional maps just because we thought it was funny. Being a business owner is fun!
This month, we’ve been turning the Agenda over to some other Arizona-based newsletters, introducing our audience to a few fantastic Substack colleagues. (Some of our other Substack colleagues, however, didn’t make the cut.)
Most of all, we had fun.
News is a stressful business. It’s really not worth doing unless you’re having fun.
Hank had a lot of fun this year pretending to be a lobbyist. He talked a few lawmakers into sponsoring a bill to put up a monument honoring assassinated journalist Don Bolles — and even though the bill died, we started a broader effort for next year. Hank also signed up as a poll worker, reporting back his experience in both print and radio format. He does love a good gimmick. Rachel continued her printcraft, putting together mad lib sheets for the NIMBY battles at local city councils. She found some new niches, like election debacles in counties that aren’t Maricopa and the changing abortion landscape here.
We set up an Agenda merch store (though we’re still waiting for the day we see an Agenda t-shirt in the wild).
And inevitably, we had to ban our first commenter from our website after they took things a little too far. Yep… It was former Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal. Good guess. Also, Kari Lake tweeted a screenshot of one of our newsletters, so we briefly worried that we would qualify as “real news” in her book. But then her goons kicked Hank out of another event, so that made us feel better.
We have you to thank.
Most of all, we want to celebrate you all. In many ways, this was our first real year in business. During our first year, we knew we’d get paid that advance money from Substack. This year, shit got real.
But you all kept showing up, offering encouragement, news tips, advice and support in the comments section, in emails, on Twitter, in texts and real life.
We read every note you send (even if we don’t always reply … sorry!). They warm our hearts.
So we want to close out our birthday by looking back at a small sample of the literally hundreds of nice messages you all have left us in posts, emails and comments in the past year.
Your support, encouragement and generosity mean the world to us.
Thanks for coming along on this ride.
"The Arizona Agenda is like a crash course for understanding the background to the stories in the headlines. It helps me be a better citizen and voter.”
"Solid local journalism is an essential for a functioning democracy. I applaud your efforts!"
"I support independent, unbiased journalism that deals with the facts of an issue and plays no favorites."
"I like reading the short, concise articles, with bits of humor sprinkled in."
"I support your work because of the refreshing reports that are given to us. Finally, articles I can read that are accurate, honest and sometimes very entertaining!"
"News based on facts, and local news are important; and I value them enough to pay for them."
"It’s a great and fun read every morning."
"I appreciate great journalism! Thank you for caring about our crazy state.”
"I've been reading you for free. $10 a month is a great investment. Keep up the great work."
"I read the AZ Star and the Washington Post, but I felt a need for more in depth Arizona reporting. Your budget article won me over. In addition, your reporting seems very centric. You call stupid where you see stupid and foul where you see foul."
"It's sooooo in the weeds. I've been looking for a fresh way to assassinate my time."
"Much better jokes than the Yellow Sheet Report, thank you for your service!"
"I love state and local news and you all are fantastic at providing it!”
“I love the Arizona Agenda for its slightly snarky take on the local news. I appreciate its absence of pontification, it’s humor, and rejection of hypocrisy.”
“I’m an AZ native who views politics like taking nasty medicine: plugged nose and gagging on the spoon. Thanks for your diligence in helping us see how the sausage is made, and for making it palatable and humorous.”
“Wow, great job as always, AZ Agenda. I sure appreciate all that you write about. I would never know ANY of this without your stories.”
"I've been reading for free for a couple months. Time to support your great journalism."