Thankful for: The political outsiders

Nicole is thankful to finally get that boot off her foot.

Hello again, readers,

We’re giving the team the week off to work on a couple of big projects that we’ve got cooking here at the Agendaverse.

But because we’re compulsively nervous workaholics, we couldn’t just leave you alone this week.

Instead, we asked each of our team members to write a little thank-you note to our readers, talking about whatever it is they’re thankful for.

Today is Nicole’s turn.

Also, we’re still soliciting answers to our annual survey, which will help guide our work next year. Please take a moment to chime in!

As the second anniversary of my first day reporting at the Arizona Agenda passed earlier this month, I couldn’t help but think about how it all started.

Hank took me on a tour of the Capitol to get to know my new beat, but I had a broken ankle, so I was scootering through the hallways with my foot in a boot, trying to act like a very serious journalist while traveling at the speed of a Roomba.

We ran into former House Speaker Rusty Bowers, and Hank fell into an easy hallway conversation with him — the kind that’s full of context you only pick up by spending time in this building. I remember thinking: “This is how this place works.”

The Capitol runs on relationships and a thousand unwritten rules that make perfect sense once you’ve been around them, and almost no sense if you haven’t.

I think a lot of people feel that way — like they’re on the outside of the government’s inside joke.

One of my favorite stories I reported this year was about Arizona’s Head Start system for early child care. I got to read “Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes” to a group of Head Start students, and their enthusiasm honestly healed my soul a little bit.

Two years later, I’ve gained an intimate understanding of how state government shapes your taxes, your schools and your access to basic services. And I’ve come to more fully appreciate the Agenda’s mission is to be “a daily insider publication for political outsiders,” with the freedom to explain, contextualize and occasionally side-eye the process in ways a corporate-owned paper usually can’t.

It’s not the “this happened and you should know about it” coverage I was used to at my previous reporting gigs. The Agenda does more: a little mischief, yes, but we also take elaborate policy and make it readable. We center stories on the people living with lawmakers’ decisions, not press releases.

This year, that freedom has allowed me to turn the convoluted state budget process into an easy-to-follow recipe, explain legislators’ different roles with a high school cafeteria metaphor and map out who actually owns Arizona’s biggest news organizations.

I’ve been able to obsess over extremely consequential topics: why Arizona’s food-bank safety net can’t handle SNAP cuts; how an evangelical lawmaker ended up passing a strikingly “woke” compensation law for the wrongfully incarcerated; and why politicians walked back their promise to stop using tax money to fund a privately owned baseball team.

Here’s the thing: The future of journalism is looking about as steady as I did rolling through the Capitol on a knee scooter two years ago.

But I still believe an informed public is how anything gets better — how power gets checked, and how real change happens.

And because you’ve shown up for this kind of work, I get to keep doing it. Thank you for reading the Arizona Agenda, for caring about this state and for sticking with me along the way.

I’m very lucky to have you in this little club of political outsiders.