New year, new Agenda
New publications … New faces … And a major upgrade.
This year, we’re launching three new publications — weekly newsletters covering education, water and AI policy.
They’re called … you guessed it … the Education Agenda, the Water Agenda and the A.I. Agenda.
Each will offer a weekly drill-down into the policies and personalities that rule their subject areas. And we’re utilizing Skywolf to keep track of all the madness.
We’ve also brought in a few policy pros to help.
Adi Jagannathan will run the AI Agenda. Longtime readers may remember Adi — he built our AI-powered bill tracking service, Skywolf, and he’s a thought leader in the artificial intelligence space. We could literally listen to Adi talk about AI policy all day.
Christian Sawyer will lead the Water Agenda. Christian is a water researcher, activist and our go-to freelancer on all things water. Not to mention he copy-edits every edition of the Agenda.
And Hank will run the Education Agenda, having covered schools and education policy for years. To be honest, he prefers covering education to politics.
The truly exciting thing about these publications is the way we’re building them. Adi has been hard at work building scrapers and running AI agents that gather vast amounts of information for our reporters in each of the policy areas — a system that Adi describes as an “Iron Man suit for journalists.”
And did we mention that you can subscribe for free? (But of course, you can also pay to support our ambitious endeavors!)
Sign up now. The first editions will be hitting mailboxes next week.
A New Reporter
We’re also proud to announce we’ve hired a new reporter in Tucson … And not just any reporter.
Joe Ferguson is kind of a legend in the Tucson journalism crowd.
When Hank was just a college student in Tucson, he was already looking up to Joe as the seasoned city government reporter for the daily paper in town.
Not only is he the kind of old-school local journalist who can help us in our goal of reinventing old-school local journalism — he’s always been ahead of the curve in terms of utilizing technology to bolster his journalism skills.
For example, Joe once created a Twitter bot that tweeted every time a local politician deleted a tweet.1
That’s exactly the kind of creative and investigative spirit we need here at the Agenda.
Not to mention, he’s been an Agenda fan since the start.
Our sister ‘sletter, the Tucson Agenda, has more about Joe and what he’ll be doing and covering. But we’re excited to say that you’ll see his work in the Arizona Agenda as well.
One of our big ambitions this year is to better synchronize the newsletters and utilize the fact that we have four skilled full-time reporters who understand both Tucson2 and state politics well enough to write for either publication. We’re going to take advantage of that going forward.
So please, head over to the Tucson Agenda, subscribe and leave a comment welcoming Joe to the team.
Skywolf 2.0
Finally, our team of developers has been hard at work revamping Skywolf with new tools, features, functionality and a new beautiful design.
We’re getting ready to launch the 2.0 version in the next few weeks.
You’ll notice some major upgrades, including:
Committee transcripts
A sweet new stats page
More real-time alert options
Cleaner, more detailed reports
Added lawmaker stats
And we’re still building.
Unlike those venture-capital-funded, 50-state bill-tracking services that don't understand Arizona’s legislative process, Skywolf is locally owned and run by people who have been in the Arizona legislation-tracking business for decades.
If you’re a political professional who hasn’t signed up for Skywolf yet, what are you waiting for?
Harvesting hurdles: Donald Trump’s promises of mass deportation and other immigration reforms could upend Arizona’s agriculture industry by decreasing the number of workers relying on the H-2A farmworker visa program to harvest food here, the Republic’s Clara Migoya and Laura Gersony write. Trump allies have called for an end to the visa program that provides a legal pathway to work in the U.S., while undocumented workers make up an estimated half of the agricultural workforce. Meanwhile, newly sworn-in U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego said deporting "a certain type of illegal immigrants'' is okay, without specifying what that means, per KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez and Capitol scribe Howie Fischer. And some migrant aid groups in Tucson are receiving intimidating postcards asking people to report suspected undocumented immigrants, the Star’s Emily Bregel reports.
The trifecta: Defendants in Arizona’s fake electors' cases are boosting their arguments that the charges are politically motivated by pointing to the perceived partisanship of a group that conducted research for the case and has worked for three of Arizona’s top Democratic officials, the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. The States United Democracy Center, an election integrity group, has provided free work for Gov. Katie Hobbs, Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. But the extensive legal memo it wrote to help Mayes prosecute fake electors wasn’t driven by political interests, the group says.
Nationwide sunsets: Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen thinks Trump should elevate his administration’s fixation on government efficiency by adopting Arizona’s sunset law on the federal level, Petersen wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. The process requires state agencies to go through a legislative review process every eight years3 to be renewed.
Don’t let the Agenda sunset. Upgrade to a paid subscription today!
All bets on the septuagenarian: Fontes said the Secretary of State’s Office is in “desperate need of updating some systems,” like election night reporting and the voter information database. Fontes told KTAR’s Mike Broomhead the election night reporting tool is an in-house system that only one 70-year-old man knows how to work. Meanwhile, incoming Sen. Mark Finchem told some of his new Prescott constituents he’s dropping his demand that Arizona hand-count ballots, but he wants machine tabulators to have “Department of Defense-level cybersecurity standards” even though they’re not connected to the internet, per Capitol scribe Howie Fischer.
Fraud squad: Outgoing Scottsdale Mayor David Ortega insists his successor Lisa Borowsky fraudulently won the election and suggested she colluded with a group that worked to block the development of the new Axon headquarters, a company that makes tasers and body cameras for law enforcement, Scottsdale Progress’ Tom Scanlon reports. Borowsky’s business shares an address with the office of the petition effort, which is a three-story office building with dozens of tenants.
Green business: The cannabis industry sure has come a long way in Arizona. It employs 22,000 people and the University of Arizona and Gateway Community College are now offering courses on running a cannabis business, KJZZ’s Kathy Ritchie reports. UA’s classes start this week and focus on both growing the plant and legally selling it.
A giant baby billboard along Loop 303 finally got the press it deserves.
The 20-foot-tall baby pushes an orange tractor as smaller adults try to corral it. It’s an advertisement for Duncan Family Farms, and co-owner Kathleen Duncan said advertising restrictions prevented the company from putting up a standard billboard with the farm’s name, per 12News’ Jade Cunningham. In a creative turn of events, the farm made a head-turning “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid”-inspired mural instead.
The baby in the picture is now 27 and has two babies of her own.
Keep in mind, Joe made this bot in 2013, when you actually had to write code for that kind of thing.
Fun fact: Every single one of us worked at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson at one time or another.
It used to be 10 years and Petersen and the like have been pushing to shorten that timeframe.
I look forward to the Water Agenda. I'm currently in a graduate level certificate program for water resources and want to work in state, so it will be great to learn more about the issues.
Great move bringing Joe Ferguson into the operation. He's a towering figure in Arizona journalism with expert knowledge and experience from working in Tucson and Flagstaff!