The Daily Agenda: An ad caper in the corporate paper

The subplot of the Agenda is building the Agenda ... The subterranean problems surface ... And the subpar candidates are piling up.

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Remember last week when we showed you that full-page ad we put in the Sunday print edition of the Arizona Daily Star? 

We said it was just the beginning of a monthlong digital ad campaign for the Agenda and our sister newsletter in Southern Arizona, the Tucson Agenda. 

Well, we have some bad news, readers: The Star canceled our digital ad campaign.

To be fair, we never really expected them to run the first one! It was pretty bold.

But just wait until you see the one they wouldn’t run!

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You see, Lee Enterprises and Gannett, which co-own the Star, brought in $34 million in revenue from Tucson’s only daily paper last year and kept $9 million of that as profit for the shareholders. Since then, the companies have laid off about a quarter of the Star’s newsroom.

It pisses us off to watch millions of dollars per year get sucked out of our communities’ newspapers. It’s not just hurting the news industry — the health of our civic ecosystem is directly tied to the health of our journalistic institutions. 

That’s part of the reason we started the Agenda: to make sure your subscription dollars actually pay for local journalism instead of the dividends and golden parachutes for out-of-state owners that companies like Lee shell out.

So we made an advertisement about it. 

But the corporate owners of the Star were not happy when they realized we bought an ad in one of their papers that trolled them! 

Unsurprisingly, however, they didn’t catch the ad until it had already run. That’s what happens when you lay off, outsource or consolidate anyone who might have asked, “Are we really going to run this?”

After the print ad ran, we got an email saying the Star was canceling our digital ads because of a “conflict of interest.” Then we got a call from the vice president of sales at Lee saying Lee wouldn’t run our digital ads since they were a “mirror” of the print one that trolled them and violated their rules on unauthorized “advocacy.”

All but one of our digital ads were simple banners promoting the Tucson Agenda, just like this.

Lee Enterprises deemed this ad “advocacy” akin to a political campaign.

Just as Lee ran our print ad without ever looking at it, they canceled the digital ads without even looking at them. 

After a few phone calls, Lee tentatively agreed to run the ads — if we would make some changes. They wanted to review our “About Us” page. And they took particular issue with one ad that included testimonials from readers, saying cutting those would be a good “first step.” 

This is the ad Lee refused to run.

Ultimately, we decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to redesign the ads and hope Lee wouldn’t find something new to take issue with. We told them we’d settle up for the print ad and spend our digital advertising dollars elsewhere.

We’re not trying to rub the Star’s nose in this silly debacle or embarrass any of the talented, hardworking reporters, editors or ad salespeople left at the paper. We’re not even mad. The Star has every right to cancel our ads.

But it is funny that a national newspaper chain was so threatened by a four-month-old Substack newsletter written by two of its former reporters that it yanked our ads. Maybe Lee should invest more in its business.

Don’t get us wrong, it was a fun coup to get a competitor to run our ads. But our goal was always to let people know what we’re about and hope they’d like it enough to pay for it. 

The Tucson Agenda is a young, scrappy, startup outlet with a ticking clock. If it doesn’t grow quickly, it’ll run out of money and cease to exist. It needs to find readers to survive.

Luckily, advertising works! We brought in a ton of new readers to both publications.

Speaking of ads…

You probably noticed that ad at the top of today’s email. And you Tucson Agenda subscribers may have noticed they’ve been running ads for local organizations like the Children’s Museum and United Way.

Goodman’s Furniture owner Adam Goodman is a big booster of local news, and we’re glad to have them as the Arizona Agenda’s first official advertiser.

As we build the Agenda and create a more diverse media landscape for you, ads will be part of the equation. If we can sell even a fraction of our ad space, we could hire a new reporter next year. But we have to set up some ground rules.

First, advertising will never impact our coverage. And we’re not gonna take ads from politicians or political campaigns. We also probably won’t run an ad that trolls us — at least, we’ll charge a premium for them.

But if you have an event, organization or business you want to promote, please keep your ad dollars in local journalism by advertising with us!

Stop digging!: Attorney General Kris Mayes filed for a preliminary injunction to stop a Chino Valley mine operation that could become a public nuisance, the Republic's Lacey Latch reports. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management halted construction on the 50-mile SunZia transmission line in the San Pedro River Valley after Tohono O’odham Tribal Chairman Verlon Jose alerted the feds the construction could disrupt ancient burial and archeological sites, the Star’s Tony Davis reports.

Liberal handouts: Conservative commentator Robert Robb takes Arizona’s Freedom Caucus to task for its “irresponsible” family tax rebate, which helped blow a hole in Arizona’s budget, saying of course Gov. Katie Hobbs tried to take credit for it: it’s an expansion of the welfare state. 

“Hoffman probably lacks the mental dexterity to ask and ponder the following question, whose pondering is quite illuminating: Why would a liberal Democrat such as Hobbs want to associate herself with a program concocted by a cadre of MAGA street fighters?” Robb writes.

They’re called suicide lanes for a reason: Phoenix residents are renewing an effort to get rid of the reverse lanes, or suicide lanes, on Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street that switch from turn to travel lanes in peak traffic, the Republic’s Taylor Seely reports. Residents say they’re dangerous, confusing and disrupt connectivity, but a 2021 Phoenix-conducted study said conditions along parallel arterials would “deteriorate” without the reverse lanes. 

Crime and punishment: An internal investigation found alarming accounts of malpractice in the Tempe Police Department’s crime scene unit, which was suspended from collecting evidence in July after the problems became apparent, the Republic’s Sam Kmack and Elena Santa Cruz report. The investigation’s report details expired testing kits, deleted crime scene photos and no standards for processing evidence. Meanwhile, Arizona’s Department of Corrections submitted a plan to spend more on inmate health care in response to a 2012 court case that found the state’s prisons don’t provide sufficient medical and mental health care, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. 

On thin margins: A proposition to significantly boost the salaries of Tucson’s mayor and city council is passing by such a narrow margin that it’s now in recount territory, the Arizona Luminaria’s Carolina Cuellar writes. A new state law requires a recount when the margin of victory is equal to or less than 0.5% of the total votes cast for the proposition. As of Friday afternoon, the proposition was leading by 299 votes or a margin of 0.3%.

She’s tough: Former U.S. Sen. Martha McSally fought off an attacker who grabbed her behind and groped her while she was jogging. The man has since been arrested, and McSally, a sexual violence survivor, detailed the incident in a social media video.

“He tried to take power from me, but I turned it on him and he was running from me instead of the other way around,” she said. “(I’m) not giving anyone advice on how to respond in situations like this… I just sprung into action to go after him and have him running from me. And I’m safe and I’m glad I did that.”

They were impulse buys: University of Arizona faculty members say the school’s recently announced “financial crisis” is the result of a management issue. Faculty members say they’ve long had concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability by President Robert C. Robbins and a series of recent financial decisions, including loaning the athletic department more than $50 million during the pandemic and the purchase of the online Ashford University (now called the UA Global Campus), they told the Arizona Daily Star’s Ellie Wolfe.

The “QAnon Shaman” AKA Jacob Angeli-Chansley wants to run for Congress in the West Valley’s 8th Congressional District as a Libertarian. 

As a felon for his role in the Jan. 6 riots, he can’t vote for himself. But he can run.