Never be boring

The big three … Who needs directors? … And hail to the chief.

Hey readers, 

Did you know that the very first promise the Agenda ever made to its subscribers was we wouldn’t be boring? 

Our goal here at the Agenda is not just to tell you the facts of a news story on a given day, though we do a fair amount of that. 

We started the Agenda so regular people can nerd out on the fascinating and wild world of Arizona politics. 

We bring you behind the scenes so you know what’s happening in your government. We want to help people learn how politics and policy work so they don’t immediately assume everything is a conspiracy. We watchdog politicians so they stay honest.

We think people are interested and smart enough to learn this stuff, but they don’t have a place to do it. 

In many ways, “don't be boring” is an easy promise to keep, given the weirdness of our beat. 

But that promise means more than just covering the craziness of Arizona politics. It also means keeping the email unique, fun and fresh — even for us. 

And that means always evolving.

So we’ve got three exciting developments coming up that we’d like to tell you about today as we prepare to celebrate the Agenda’s third birthday. 

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1. A New Format

Despite the overwhelming majority of you survey-takers who urged us not to make any changes to the daily email and simply “stay the course,” we unfortunately cannot do that. 

You see, after three years, we’re getting a little bored¹ with our daily email format.²

And as Harvey Danger taught us in the mid-90s, if you’re bored then you’re boring. So we’re going to keep experimenting and mixing it up. 

Most immediately, that means we’re trying to ratchet the email up to five segments per day from its current three segments. 

And when we have a story that deserves more space, we’re going to kill that format altogether and just send that story, rather than the daily email format you’re used to. 

We have some fun concepts for new segments — including collectible trading cards of politicians, flash cards for propositions and a political dictionary — that we’re going to start adding to the daily email. 

But you survey-takers had the best ideas for new sections!

• Bios of the governor’s advisors? Heck yes. 

• Updates on old stories? Love it. 

• A “gotcha” section where we call out lying politicians? That’s kind of the whole email but yeah, sure, let’s make it a regular segment!

• More Q&As and guest opinions? We can do that.

• A “bill watch” segment telling you when bills are on the move? Skywolf makes that easy for us to pull off.

• A “getting shit done” segment showcasing effective politicians? Might not have enough content to be a steady feature, but we’ll give it a shot!

This all leads us to our next point: that damn paywall. 

We hate using a paywall. Unfortunately, we gotta make a living and it’s human nature to not pay for something that is free. 

Expanding the daily email beyond what we’re currently doing gives us a little more confidence to put more of our work behind a paywall. 

So, free readers, if you want the very best of what the Agenda offers, including some cool new segments, you’ll have to pay up. 

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2. Skywolf

Building Skywolf, our legislative tracking service, has been one hell of an undertaking. 

When we launched Skywolf in January, it was admittedly buggy. Brand new tech usually is.

But our co-founder, lead product developer and bug gladiator, Adi Jagannathan, squished those bugs faster than they could pop up. He has a cool graph to prove it.

Now, less than a year into building Skywolf, we’re confident we have the best tool on the market for legislative searching, tracking, reporting, notifications and communicating with lawmakers.

But don’t listen to us. Take it from a professional lobbyist.

"I talk about Skywolf to every lobbyist I interact with. While it had some growing pains early in session, it was far and above better than the alternative this year."

-Emily Rice, B3 Strategies.

In the last few months, we’ve picked up some major clients, including big lobbying firms, associations and state departments. 

And we’ve added new features like the ability to search through every word of every bill, sort bills by ARS title and set alerts for any new bill mentioning your keywords. 

We also built new filters to help you slice and dice your way through the massive mound of bills that pile up every year.

• Want to see all the bills that made it out of the House or Senate? There’s a filter for that.

• Want to see all the strike-everything amendments that made it into law? Easy. 

• Want to see only the strikers that deal with election law that got signed by the governor? Yep, Skywolf has you covered. 

And we still have more than four months of building before the next session begins. 

We’re using that time to develop major new features that will give our customers a competitive edge. 

Features like alerts for “request to speak” sign-ins, so you always know what the competition is up to. Or linking news stories to bills, so you’ll always know what people are saying about your legislation. And perhaps our biggest undertaking this summer: transcripts of committee hearings. 

Skywolf is an Arizona company building an Arizona-specific tool for Arizona political professionals. 

If that’s something you’d like to try out, fill out the form to request a demo today. 

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3. Some Sad News

Finally, our art intern, ChatGPT, is graduating.

They’ve been accepted into a prestigious fine art program at a fancy art school in New York City and will be leaving us in the fall. 

We’ll miss them immensely, though they’ve promised to take on the occasional freelance project. 

But the good news is, we’re having one hell of a going-away soiree. 

We’re throwing a fundraiser to auction off some of their finest framed canvases, as well as mugs, stickers, T-shirts and the like, featuring some of the best images our art intern has created during this internship. 

And we’ll use the proceeds to hire a real live human artist for some projects we’ve been dreaming up for a while. 

We’ll tell you more as the event approaches, but it should be a rocking art party for a good cause.

Our art intern, ChatGPT, depicts our art intern, ChatGPT, graduating.

Nomination tug-of-war: Gov. Katie Hobbs lost her legal battle with GOP lawmakers, so she agreed to send director nominations to a Senate committee for confirmation, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. The question for the upcoming legislative session, Republic columnist Laurie Roberts notes, is whether GOP lawmakers will be magnanimous in victory and “put a muzzle on their attack dog,” Sen. Jake Hoffman, or let Hoffman keep sabotaging the process. And the issue might not be settled quite yet, the Republic’s Ray Stern reports. The judge wasn’t happy with some of the wording in the agreement between Hobbs and Sen. Warren Petersen.

Ballot battles: The right to an abortion will be on the ballot in November, now that the Secretary of State certified the signatures gathered by Arizona for Abortion Access, the Associated Press reports. Elsewhere on the November ballot, the description of the Make Elections Fair Act needs to be rewritten. A Maricopa County judge said the ballot measure description written by lawmakers was unfair and confusing, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl reports.

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign: Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego put up her campaign signs too early, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports. City rules say the earliest they can go up in city rights of way is Aug. 26. Gallego’s opponent, Republican Matt Evans, said Gallego was cheating. Speaking of campaign signs, the deadline for getting rid of the old ones is today, but only for losing candidates, AZFamily’s Kylee Cruz reports. Primary winners can keep their signs up until the general election.

Harassment on the school board: The superintendent of the Tolleson Union High School District says he’s the victim of sexual harassment from Elda Luna-Najera, the president of the district’s governing board and a Democratic state lawmaker. The board held an emergency meeting Friday to discuss whether to fire Superintendent Jeremy Calles, 12 News’ Bianca Buono reports. Calles said the meeting was retaliation for him filing a complaint against Luna-Najera last week after rebuffing her sexual advances for months, AZFamily’s Derek Staahl reports. 

So many options: Mexican food in Phoenix has become a campaign stop tradition and the Republic’s Endia Fontanez shares the top five spots readers said Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz should try next time they’re in town. Axios Phoenix’s Jeremy Duda went to Cocina Adamex, where Harris and Walz got to-go orders of tamales, to see what other dishes are worthy of a presidential campaign.

Your subscriptions fuel us with tortas, machaca and conchas.

Stellar inspiration: Northern Arizona University athletics now has an alternate identity, the Astrojacks, the school said in a press release. The idea is to embrace the region’s wealth of astronomical contributions, alongside the traditional lumberjack. To mirror Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, the Astrojack mascot is Blouie the Space Ox. 

International hit: A baseball stadium in Agua Prieta is one of just six in the world where a homerun can land in another country, the Herald/Review’s Lyda Longa reports. One of the people Longa spoke to remembered hitting a homer at the Luis Encinas Stadium, where the border fence that separates Agua Prieta from Douglas runs along the left-field wall. He couldn’t claim an international homerun, though. He’s left-handed so the ball went over the right-field wall instead.

Recount season begins: Now that the canvass is done, Arizona Secretary of State officials are starting the recount process for the Democratic primary in the 3rd Congressional District, where Yassamin Ansari has a 42-vote lead over Raquel Terán, Fox10’s Gabriel Sandoval and Sejal Govindarao report.

Say what you will about former Gov. Doug Ducey, but he does his duty to his party. 

Seriously, you can say whatever you want about him and he’ll still endorse you. 

Ducey announced his endorsement of Kari Lake, who ridiculed him not too long ago but was super gracious after the endorsement, and Donald Trump. 

1. Fun fact about working in political journalism: After about two years, you start to feel like you’ve heard this song before. After four years, you realize you’re actually listening to one really long album on repeat. About eight years in, you finally grasp that it’s the same album that has always been playing and always will play. A decade into this business, you notice that there are a few new notes and chords occasionally mixed into this never-ending tune. You start living for those new notes, which keeps you sane for a while. After your fourth presidential election, however, you’re so stark-raving mad from the torture of listening to that one album on repeat for 13 years that you quit your job. But by then, you’re physically addicted to the music, so you start a Substack just to keep listening. By your fifth presidential election cycle, you’re making up new email segments just to get through the day. It is the natural progression of things.

2. This is also our theory of why the press corps fell for Donald Trump in 2016 — he was a whole cacophony of new notes.