The Daily Agenda: Welcome Nicole!

You're gonna love her ... Subscribe today to pay her more! ... And we probably won't have Leezah Sun to kick around anymore.

We warned you last week that Hank’s long solo summer is finally coming to an end. 

2024 is right around the corner, and it’s time to call in some reinforcements. 

We cast our net far and wide to find you the next host of this newsletter. Hank interviewed about a dozen candidates across three states before finding the right person.

We wanted someone with reporting chops who would add a fresh perspective to the Capitol beat. Someone who has proven themselves in a corporate daily newsroom but doesn’t really belong there. Someone who can do the nerdy deep dive policy stuff that Hank doesn’t have the attention span for, but who also has an eye for the absurd and the weird. Somebody fun and witty who gets the Agenda’s vibe. 

And we needed somebody who’s committed to the Agenda’s vision and can grow into an owner and partner, not just an employee. 

Meet Nicole Ludden. She starts today. 

This is Nicole. It’s too late to warn her not to work here, but you can leave her a nice comment with this button.

Nicole has been covering the nitty gritty of Tucson government and politics for the Daily Star. You’ve seen her byline lots of times in our Other News section. 

Now, she’s moving back to Phoenix to watchdog a whole new crop of politicians at the state Capitol. 

She’s gonna be fantastic. 

Nicole is a journalist’s journalist. She’s still young, but she has been doing it basically her whole life — she took charge of her high school newspaper and never had the good sense to look back. She has been through the wringer of corporate news, bouncing around newsrooms like the Republic, the Tucson Weekly and the Star. 

She’s smart enough to read the writing on the wall about journalism but crazy enough to think she can rewrite it. That’s the kind of energy we require at the Agenda. 

But you don’t have to take just Hank’s word for it. Nicole’s bona fides are backed up by some of the best in the business. 

“I’ve been in this business a long time, but I learned a lot of new tricks from watching Nicole work. Whether she was covering the latest developments about the COVID outbreak, criminal justice issues or local government agencies, she kicked ass. She just might be the best young reporter I’ve worked with since I first sicced Hank on state lawmakers back in 2008.”

-Jim Nintzel, Nicole’s former editor at the Tucson Weekly

“Nicole has the passion and tenacity of an old-school journalist and the modern sensibility of a digital native. She has a natural sense of what makes a good story and is fearless about nailing it down. Plus, she’s one of those fantastic colleagues who just gets stuff done. I have no doubt she will serve Arizona Agenda readers very well.”

-Jill Jorden Spitz, Nicole’s former editor at the Arizona Daily Star

“Teaching journalism is a little like playing ‘Name That Tune.’ After quite a bit of practice, I can look into the eyes of a roomful of surly undergrads and pick out the one or two who will really shine. I'm rarely wrong and nailed it when Nicole showed up in ‘Intro to Editing.’ She asked the right questions, did the work and paid attention to the world. It's been so great to follow her work since, and I can't wait to see what she uncovers at the Agenda.” 

-Amy Silverman, executive producer at KJZZ and Nicole’s former ASU professor

And here’s a fun kink to the deal we worked out: Any new subscriptions Nicole brings in this week will go directly into her base salary!

We’re even dropping the price a little to motivate you to support local journalists. 

Nicole joins the Agenda at a crucial moment. Season 3 of “The Agenda” finds us heading into a new legislative session (which will be marked by the first budget cuts in nearly a decade) and our first presidential election since we launched in 2021. 

It’s going to be a long year. Please pray for us…

But it’s also an exhilarating time to be at the Agenda. 

After more than two years of finger-blistering work, we’ve built a small army of paid subscribers (enlist today!) who have made the Agenda financially sustainable. 

Thanks to your support, we even have a little cash in the bank that we’re investing in growth and new products for you.  

So far, we’ve found you nearly 10,000 subscribers through word of mouth and the occasional legacy media story that mentions us. 

Yesterday, we bought our first paid advertisement. It’s a doozy, and the full-page print ad is just the first portion of a monthlong digital advertising campaign to get the word out. 

But you, loyal readers, will always be our main source of new subscribers. Please take a moment to share the Agenda with some friends. 

Or better yet, get some holiday shopping done now and send someone a gift subscription. You can even click today and set it to start arriving after the holidays. 

We’ve got a lot of exciting new ventures coming up in 2024, including breaking out of the confines of the newsletter! 

You’ll see more content in more formats from us in Season 3. We’re developing a podcast and a short video program, and we’ll be leaning into social media platforms to expand our storytelling options.

More on that coming up, but in the meantime, find us on: 

• Instagram 📸

• Threads 🧵

• Facebook 👋🏽

• Linkedin 👔

• And yes, even Twitter🤮

We also updated our About Us page! Check it out.

As the Agenda universe grows from a two-person newsletter to a full-blown (tiny) media empire, we’re also excited to announce we’re opening up some sponsorship opportunities in the daily newsletters. Those sponsorships will be kept to classy banners, not obnoxious pop-ups, and will help us grow by having more than one revenue source to rely on. You’ll start seeing those this week.

We’re going to give Nicole a little breathing room this week so she can set up her email and generally find her bearings. This will be our final week of publishing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Next week, we begin Season 3 at full speed and five days per week!

Stick around — 2024 is going to be insane. 

And, as always, thank you for your continued support. The Agenda exists because readers like you pay for it. Thank you!

We’re skipping Other News today because we want to keep the spotlight on Nicole.

But we can’t let you go without pointing you to the weekend’s weirdest fallout. 

As we noted last week, there’s a lot more brewing on the Democratic Rep. Leezah Sun front. 

House Democratic leaders filed an ethics complaint against her on Friday, and it certainly looks like she’s going to get bounced from the Legislature.

And that other fiasco we hinted at? Well, Democrats are hip to it. 

As the Capitol Times reports, Democratic leadership asked her about an incident in which she presented herself as acting on behalf of Attorney General Kris Mayes (which, it should go without saying, she was not) while intervening in a court-ordered transfer of minor children from their mother’s custody to their father’s custody, per court records and Democrats’ complaint against her.

Sun wouldn’t answer their questions about it.

It just keeps getting weirder!