Not bad for a day’s work

The Tucson Agenda is 1/10th of the way to sustainable … Can we create a new kind of employee-owned newsroom with a statewide reach? … Only if you help us!

On Friday, we announced our first spin-off project, the Tucson Agenda, and asked you to support it. And, holy cow, did you folks come through.

About 600 of you subscribed, and more than 100 of you chose to pay for your subscription without even knowing who was leading it.

That translates to almost $15,000 in annual subscription revenue — about 10% of what we’d need to make this work as a two-person operation. Not bad for a day’s work! 

If you’re one of the people who subscribed over the weekend, you’re in good company. In addition to the hundreds of regular people who signed up, we also got a ton of support from Tucson movers and shakers, along with officials from law enforcement, statewide elected offices, the Legislature and Congress.

A few of you subscribed as Founding Members, and some even donated to help cover some of our start-up costs. That’s awesome! 

If you haven’t subscribed yet, there’s still plenty of time. Just click this button.

You can also give us a one-time donation to help cover startup costs, or join our circle of sustaining donors who care about their community and are willing to give a little more to make sure Tucson has a strong, diverse media. 

Or if you’ve already done that, please help us spread the word. Send a note to some friends who might enjoy the Tucson Agenda like you enjoy the Arizona Agenda. 

We’ll get to the big reveal of who’s running the Tucson Agenda in a minute. 

But first, we want to talk a little about our broader vision for the Agenda universe. 

When we launched the Arizona Agenda nearly two years ago, we never really expected it to work. That is, we knew we could write a cool publication. But we didn’t believe it could generate enough revenue quickly enough to be sustainable beyond the year of “advance” funding we received from Substack. We expected to be begging to get our old jobs back at dying corporate newspapers by now. 

But when we hit six figures in revenue in 12 months, we realized it is possible to build a tiny newsroom with just a little luck, a lot of hard work, a good niche and the right people. 

So we started thinking: Where else might a tiny newsletter that can punch above its weight class be able to scale quickly and survive? 

Sure, Arizona politics is a hot niche, but could an Agenda-style newsletter work at a local level?

Could we stitch together several tiny newsrooms laser-focused on their communities — be that the Arizona political community, a community focused on a single issue like water, or a community as in city or town — to create a new kind of employee-owned profit/resource/revenue-sharing newsroom that has a statewide impact and reach? 

The Tucson Agenda is our first step toward finding out. And we’ve got our eye on a few more areas where we think the Agenda and our friends can fill a void after this works. 

But we know a newsletter is only as good as the reporters pouring their blood, sweat and tears into it. 

So we got some of the best, hardest-working reporters in the business to lead this thing: Caitlin Schmidt and Curt Prendergast. 

Curt and Caitlin are old friends who spent nearly a decade working together and bouncing ideas off each other at the Arizona Daily Star.

Here are their semi-formal credentials: 

Caitlin started at the Star as an apprentice, and in the more than a decade since, she has covered everything from public safety and local government, to sports, courts, health and solutions. She’s a two-time winner of the Arizona Press Club’s Sledgehammer Award for her fights to obtain public records to expose government misdeeds. But she also loves writing about government or nonprofit programs that actually work. Caitlin was named 2019 Arizona Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association for her ongoing coverage of gender-based violence in the University of Arizona athletics department, and has also won awards from the Arizona Newspaper Association, First Amendment Coalition of Arizona and Best of the West.

She’s obsessed with dogs (not hyperbole) and teaches public affairs reporting at the University of Arizona School of Journalism.

Curt agrees that dogs rule, particularly the three pups at his house. In his free time, he plays so much backgammon he actually wore out some dice the other day, a fact that makes him absurdly proud.

He worked at the Star for eight years, most recently as the Star’s opinion editor until he was laid off in late April. Before that, he worked at the Nogales International for three years. He’s fluent in Spanish and has covered the Arizona-Mexico border, federal court, local politics and a variety of other beats. He won numerous awards from the Arizona Press Club and the Arizona Newspapers Association, including community journalist of the year in 2014, best news story in 2021 for reporting on the border wall built under the Trump administration, and best series in 2022 for reporting on the crisis of migrants dying in the desert. 

Curt’s recent ill fortune was our good luck. Since he was laid off, he’s been applying to jobs while also lending a hand in getting this thing off the ground (and helping Hank keep the Arizona Agenda afloat as Rachel takes time to be with her new baby).

Right off the bat, we can only guarantee that the Tucson Agenda can support one person. Caitlin is all in on this endeavor (there’s no looking back now), and Curt’s excited about the possibilities. But like everybody else, he has bills to pay. If you want him to stay on, we need to raise enough money to pay him. 

Like we said: We’re going out on a limb to do this. We have no advance from Substack. No major donor propping this up. No safety net. No guarantee we can pay Curt enough to pay the bills — at least not yet. 

So if you want Curt to stay in Tucson and the Tucson Agenda to hit full speed in year one, we need your support. 

Caitlin and Curt will be trickling out more details about their vision and plan for the publication as they get closer to the July 4 launch date. But in the meantime, we asked them to each write a little bit about who they are, why they want to start the Tucson Agenda, and what they hope to accomplish.

We’ll let them take it away:

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Caitlin Schmidt: After nearly a decade of reporting on just about every topic or issue in Tucson, Friday was my last day at the Star. It was hard. As a reporter, I had essentially grown up in that newsroom and I loved it. 

I turned my first beat — public safety — into an investigative beat by watchdogging the police and reporting on misconduct within local law enforcement. When the pandemic hit, I used my sports reporting beat as an opportunity to showcase dozens of high school athletes who were missing their final season.

In 2021, when it became clear that people were getting burnt out on “bad news,” I created a “solutions” beat at the Star focusing on people, programs and processes that fix problems and make the community a better place. It feels great to expose wrongdoing by people in power, but I found that it feels just as good to highlight the average people who are just trying to help.

I chose to leave my job (and guaranteed paychecks) because of the changes I’ve seen in the media landscape and my own newsroom. Like many other outlets, large staffing cuts at the Star in recent years mean there just aren’t enough reporters left to cover all the news that the community wants and needs to know. 

Instead of doubling down on the things that matter most, the push from corporate is often to double down on the stories that drive the largest number of pageviews. That’s why the homepage of your local corporate daily newspaper in nearly any midsized city in America is now junked up with viral stories from Pennsylvania or somewhere equally meaningless to a Tucsonan. 

I’ve been a fan of the Arizona Agenda from the start (Curt and I both worked with Hank at the Star), and I believe in its mission to help people become informed, active citizens in an entertaining and engaging way. I also love that it shines a light on the good journalism already out there, saving readers like me time when it comes to finding the news I want to consume.

I’m excited that the Tucson Agenda will bring that mission to Tucson.

I love experimenting and innovating, so creating and shaping this newsletter is a dream come true. I’m eager to engage with our community in a new and different way, and judging from the response to our launch announcement, there’s already an audience ready and waiting.

Launching the Tucson Agenda is definitely a risk.

But trying something new is refreshing. And it feels good to have more control of my future and not have to worry about being laid off during the next round of cuts. Here, I have the opportunity to start something small and make it big, rather than watching an organization I love downsize every few months.

I know Tucsonans care about their local media. And that gives me confidence that this project will work. 

The wave of support you all provided when we announced the Tucson Agenda was overwhelming. I saw a lot of names I recognize subscribing, and even more that I didn’t recognize. I look forward to connecting with all of you, and to helping you better connect with our community. Thank you!

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Curt Prendergast: For the past year or so, I’ve been reading the Arizona Agenda, a “political insider newsletter for political outsiders.” It’s been a pleasure. How great is it to open your inbox in the morning, spend 10 minutes reading the Agenda, and come away feeling like you have a good understanding of what the Legislature is doing? It’s exactly what we need for Tucson politics and government. 

We’re lucky to have talented, hardworking reporters in Tucson. We just don’t have nearly enough of them right now. As it stands, Tucsonans have to work too hard to get a good feel for what’s happening at our city hall. The purpose of the Tucson Agenda is to do that work for you. We’ll pay close attention to the political scene, help you make sense of it, and point out when officials cross lines they shouldn’t. 

It’s important work. But it’s also a gamble. 

So far, that gamble is paying off. Last weekend was an astounding success. Thank you so much to everyone who subscribed. We need every penny. But we are still far from having enough money to assure a salary for both Caitlin and me.

I would be thrilled to stay at the Tucson Agenda for the foreseeable future, but it all depends on how much money we raise. We’ll need to hit some benchmarks to ensure it can support two people in its first year. In other words, if more people don’t subscribe or donate, then I won’t be able to keep working at the Tucson Agenda. 

So please, click that button. 

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Want to help the Tucson Agenda? Here are a few things you can do:

📨 Forward or share this email. Tell all of your friends, family and random acquaintances in Tucson and Southern Arizona about this exciting new publication. Post on social media. Text a friend. Help us spread the word.

📜 Subscribe to the Tucson Agenda now. There are a lot of subscription options to choose from. You can become a founding member and get additional subscriptions for friends. You can give gift subscriptions or start a group subscription. Or you can sign up for free.

💵 Donate to help us get off the ground. Building a local newsletter from scratch takes a long time and a lot of hard work. Can you help us get there? Donate $1,000 or more to help us build a newsletter to serve your town. You’ll get some cool perks!

🙋 Get in touch. So many of our readers are experts in their fields: elected officials, lawyers, accountants, business owners, grant writers and social media marketers. If you have a skill that can help us build this thing, we’d love to hear from you. And if you have a hot tip or story idea, don’t hesitate to reach out! (You can also email info@tucsonagenda.com)

❓What’s next?: The Tucson Agenda will officially launch on July 4. Early subscribers will get occasional updates about the project and teasers about what to expect.

First up, the team is hosting a little get-together in Tucson this Friday. Mark your calendars for Friday at 6 p.m. at a location near the university. We’d love to meet some of you new subscribers!

The Tucson Agenda will send the final details to its full subscriber list Wednesday, so go subscribe!

We’ll be holding court with some beers and anyone who wants to gab about local politics, journalism and especially, the Tucson Agenda.

Hope to see you Friday!

As always, thank you all for your continued support.