See you in 2025

We’ll be back on January 6 … Fittingly … And 2025 is gonna be weird.

Good morning readers!

Welcome to our 252nd edition of 2024.

That’s a lot of emails, right?¹ We think so too.²

So after today, we’re (mostly) going dark for the rest of the year.

This is us shedding a tear because we’ll miss emailing you daily.

We want to spend a week or so planning the 2025 editorial calendars and doing taxes and other depressing business tasks, and another week catching up with sources and working ahead for January.

And we’d like to actually get some shopping/vacation time with our families this year.³

We’ve never taken this much time off at the end of the year, and it’s only possible thanks to you, paid subscribers. You’ve helped the Agenda grow to the point where we can afford paid vacations.

You’ll hear from us very sporadically until January 6th, when we’ll be back in your inbox in full force.

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In fact, we’ll be back stronger than ever.

We’re bringing a new Tucson Agenda reporter into the Agendaverse after the holidays.

We’ll tell you who it is soon. But for now, let’s just say it’s someone we’re really excited about — they understand statewide government and politics, and they know Tucson as well as anyone.

We think they’ll be a great addition to the team.

And thanks to all of you readers who upgraded to a paid subscription this year, we’re looking to hire another reporter at the Arizona Agenda next year, too.

So please stick around.⁴ We have big plans in place for 2025.

Election season is just the beginning of the political calendar. A new crop of politicians is taking office in January, and we’ll be here to keep an eye on them for you.

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We picked up a ton of new free and paid subscribers this election season.

Glad to have you all! Thanks so much for your support.

For all the new folks, we’d like to take just a minute to explain what your subscription dollars support.

Yesterday, we recapped dozens of our favorite stories this year — from our guide to the power players at the Capitol in January, to the time we made a deepfake of Kari Lake to show readers how easy it is, to last month’s exposé that forced Katie Hobbs’ tourism director to resign.

That’s a pretty reflective sample of the product: Part explainers of how politics and government work; part funny (and informative) hijinks; and part serious investigative journalism. Delivered in a tidy email that keeps you in the loop about the daily political conversation.

But our goal is bigger than the product.

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In 2021, we quit our jobs in mainstream journalism to launch the Agenda because we believed, as many do, that the media was failing in key aspects of its job.

We wanted to build a publication that did politics and government differently.

We’re political junkies who think local civics is fascinating and funny and important and addictive. We built the Agenda to show that to other people, and empower them to understand how their government works so they know who to blame when it doesn’t.

“Welcome to the Arizona Agenda, an insider’s guide to Arizona politics for the political outsider,” we wrote in our first edition. “We’re here to guide you through the bizarre and the important, and we’ll have a damn good time doing it.”

“There will be some snark and some spice, some storytelling, some explainers, some public records dives, some gossip. But mostly, we’ll just provide facts and point fingers.”

To our great surprise, it worked. You all subscribed and shared the Agenda with friends.

That has been life changing.

We’ve had a lot of shitty jobs in local journalism. Writing the Agenda for you is a dream come true.

So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you to all our subscribers who make this possible.

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We work for you.

That is our guiding principle here at the Agenda.

More than 90% of our budget last year came directly from your subscription dollars.

We don’t have to please donors, investors or advertisers. Congress can’t cut our funding. And we sure as hell don’t answer to Jeff Bezos or some corporate news conglomerate overlord.

We’re a truly independent publication accountable only to our readers.

And that gives us the freedom to do things differently.

It also means we need your support to keep doing this.

Happy holidays! We hope you’re able to take some time with your friends and families — and that nobody at your Christmas party talks politics. We could all use a break.

See you in 2025.

1. Our intern, ChatGPT, tells us there are only 251 working days in 2024. So we hit our quota.

2. Fun fact, according to this research, only 3% of newsletters on Substack publish daily.

3. It’s a luxury we can take since elections are suddenly safe and secure again and nobody wants to contest the results this year.

4. And please, update your credit cards! Expired cards are the main reason we lose subscribers.