Showing you the money
Is that a lot or a little? … Courts and aborts … It’s pronounced team-pay.
In case you somehow missed it, this week is the Agenda’s third birthday!
Thanks for sticking with us through our self-indulgent self-coverage!1
Now, the payoff: We’re gonna tell you exactly how much money this little newsletter generates.
We know you’re curious…
But first, a short lesson on local news economics.
Most reporters in this state are paid less than teachers.2
The companies that own newspapers are almost uniformly terrible employers.3
Probably 90% of the newspapers in Arizona are owned by four or five companies.4
The rest of the print news outlets worth mentioning are nonprofits that desperately need your donations, or have big institutional donors, often with an agenda.
There are maybe 10 “good” journalism jobs open in this state in a year.5
It’s in this bleak media landscape that we set out to build the Arizona Agenda in the summer of 2021.
“Set out to build” might be a bit strong.
Our pitch for the concept of the Agenda won a $100,000 “advance” from Substack and we pretty much thought we were scamming them since this publication would never make any money and Substack would never recoup its investment. We thought we’d have some fun and then get real jobs again.
Seven-hundred-and-seventy-three “What We’re Laughing Ats” later and the joke is on us.
Substack has officially turned a profit on that investment.
As of today, we are $1,306 short of our goal of reaching $250,000 in annual recurring subscription revenue by our third birthday.
But our birthday isn’t until Saturday…
Since starting the Agenda, we’ve been radically transparent about our finances. But it feels very weird to tell you readers about that quarter-million milestone.
That’s because, based on our expectations when we started, $250,000 is an absurdly large number.
And for what we really want to do with the Agenda, it’s not nearly enough.
And while it’s easy to see the slow steady growth when we back up and slap a big red arrow on it, that graph looks very different zoomed in on a 30-day view.
In the short-term view, every tiny upward squiggle on that black line is a huge spike of endorphins, every divot is a bottomless pit of soul-crushing defeat.
You think Twitter is bad? Try mainlining three years of Substack stats.
Our free-to-paid subscriber ratio remains amazing, showing our subscribers find immense value in the Agenda.
Roughly 20% of our readers choose to upgrade to paid subscriptions — a metric that has held steady since our launch three years ago.
Most newsletters are considered wildly successful if they can convince 5% to 10% of their subscribers to pay.
So what do your quarter-million subscription dollars pay for?
Well, first, that $250,000 is a little misleading. Substack takes a 10% cut,6 or $25,000 of that. Stripe takes another 3% to 4%, or about $10,000.
So more like — what will we spend your $215,000 on?
Our people.
After years of paying ourselves as (relatively low-wage) contractors and getting hit with huge tax bills at the end of the year, the Agenda now pays reasonable wages and employer taxes like a real company. It also pays 100% of our health insurance deductible. It pays dental, vision and workers’ compensation. It even pays money to the payroll service…
Nobody is rich yet, but we’re both earning more than we ever have in local journalism7 and the Agenda has built up a little nest egg for emergencies.
It finally feels sustainable, not just doable.
But it’s still a lot of work for two people.8
Your subscriptions make up the vast majority of our revenue. But we’re developing other revenue streams, like advertising and events, and chasing some grants, to help hasten our ability to hire another reporter.
In the meantime, we’re always happy to pay freelance reporters, writers and artists with a pitch or project that fits the Agenda. If that’s you, reach out!
Your subscription dollars also pay a small team of freelance helpers, like a copy editor to catch our typos, and administrative help with projects and daily customer service for our nearly 12,000 free and paid subscribers. And we pay for a handful of professional services like accountants, bookkeepers, (which is actually a separate thing from accountants — who knew?!) and the occasional consultant.
We subscribe to dozens of local newspapers, newsletters, research tools and digital services, including our tech stack of websites, emails and workspaces. We rent a desk at the Capitol, pay for public records, coffees and meals with sources, parking at the courthouse — the usual business/reporter stuff.
With a little luck, we’ll even have some money left over at the end of the year to do cool stuff, like last year when we invested some of your money to help launch the Tucson Agenda.
But that graph really means the Agenda will generate $250,000 if every paid subscriber continues to be a paid subscriber for the next 365 days.
That won’t happen. We’ll lose subscribers and we’ll gain subscribers. The trick is to do more of one than the other.
That is the most magical thing about the Agenda: It keeps growing thanks to your recommendations.
In three years, our only paid marketing has consisted of one newspaper ad (for the Tucson Agenda, really) and a handful of recent Facebook ads (from which we turned a small profit).
Our fans have truly built the Agenda by talking about it, forwarding it, sharing it on social media and paying for it.
It’s not revolutionary that a newsletter can earn a little money.
Dozens of venture capital firms are making moves in the newsletter world to “do news.” Thousands of content mill newsletters turn a profit on free content and paid advertising. There’s also a long tradition of high-dollar, low-subscriber political and trade newsletters for insiders.
The Agenda is something different.
We’re local reporters. We don’t have a few million bucks to prop us up until we’re profitable. We don’t do “content.” And the insiders read us, but they pay just $12 a month like everyone else.
Instead, we have you. And you are amazing. Thank you!
A fetus by any other name: The voter pamphlet summary for the broadly popular Arizona for Abortion Access initiative, now officially known as Prop 139, will refer to fetuses as “unborn human beings” after the Arizona Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling saying the language was too biased. Meanwhile, the New York Times ponders whether the initiative will increase Democrats’ odds in November, and the national ramifications that could have in potentially helping flip the U.S. Senate.
Not a pick-two race: Hundreds of people “over voted” in the Democratic primary for Arizona’s Congressional District 3, picking more than one candidate and invalidating their ballot, KJZZ’s Camryn Sanchez reports. The race was decided by 41 votes and is headed to a recount.
Redlining is zoning: As cities put rules in place to comply with new state laws requiring them to allow casitas, Lauren Gilger spoke to Richard Kahlenberg, director of housing policy for the Progressive Policy Institute, about the racist history of zoning laws on KJZZ’s “The Show.”
“If you look back at the history of zoning in America, you know, it starts out with a benign effort to separate industrial uses from residential uses. … But quickly it morphed into something much darker,” Kahlenberg said.
Tattler: After getting called out by the Republic for putting up her signs too early, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego’s campaign threw longshot challenger Matt Evans under the bus, telling the Republic’s Taylor Seely that Evans put his up first (and they don’t include the required “paid for by” disclosure).
Like Mayor Gallego, we also tattle on politicians!
And we need your help to keep up the tattling.
Subscribe today for maximum tattles!
Not the meth lab of democracy: Outgoing Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates is going to head a new “democracy lab” at ASU, a perch from which he hopes to help train the next generation of election workers, the Republic’s Sasha Hupka reports. The curriculum will include lessons on building a ballot, government contracts and media training, among other things.
Short-lived victory: Tracy Florea, who was elected to the Florence Town Council in the July 30 election, moved out of town and forfeited the seat before ever taking office, Pinal Central’s Mark Cowling reports. In December, once the rest of the new council is sworn in, their first order of business will be to fill the vacancy.
The Republic has a list of “Arizona words” that you might be saying wrong. Most of them are just Spanish words with a double-L sound or the Spanish H-sounding pronunciation of “G.”
But some of them are probably legitimately confusing for outsiders, like Canyon De Chelly (Canyon "du-Shay") and the Mogollon Rim (“moe-gee-yawn" or "mug-e-own”).
But if you haven’t figured out Tempe, Mesa and saguaro yet, you’re probably not reading the Republic anyway.
Luckily, the Agenda was born on a traditionally slow week in Arizona politics. Plus, Nicole is visiting family and it was either this, or take our birthday week off.
And that’s not even taking into account the state benefits and summer breaks.
Fun story: Hank won the Arizona Press Club’s Journalist of the Year award once and asked for a raise or a bonus or something from his $42,000 annual salary and was told to get a payday loan if he needed money.
We actually would love to create an interactive map detailing the Arizona media landscape. We tried to get a grant to pull it off, but have yet to succeed.
Pity the young reporter trying to break into the business who doesn’t want to leave the state.
That 10% cut is standard for all paid Substack newsletters. During our first year, Substack took 85% of our revenue in exchange for the advance.
Except perhaps that year when Hank worked two jobs at once.
Plus some help from Curt lately!
I filled out your survey, but then thought of another request. Please analyze the propositions on the November ballot: what exactly will happen if they pass, what groups are sponsoring them, how to tell the difference between a "real" proposition and a nearly identical one created to cause confusion, etc.
This actually made me tear up. Journalists should earn more than minimum wage. We rely on you for our very democracy.
“Nobody is rich yet, but we’re both earning more than we ever have in local journalism⁷ and the Agenda has built up a little nest egg for emergencies.”