Thank God it's August

It's swimming season! ... Hank is getting out of town ... And we'd like to introduce you to some friends.

Much like working the fields, politics is something of a seasonal gig. At least, it used to be. 

Instead of an annual cycle based on planting and harvesting seasons, the political cycle is a two-year sprint based around election seasons. The off-year August is the most hallowed time of the 730-day political calendar, a brief biennial reprieve from the madness when even the politicians are pretty quiet. And that sacred season was stolen from us in 2021 thanks to the Cyber Ninjas audit of the election and the media tornado it created.

It has been a very long three-and-a-half-year political cycle here in Arizona.

Now that the Legislature has finally ended its longest session in history, and politicians are fleeing the heat on junkets, Hank believes it’s safe for him to take a vacation, too. Rachel has been on maternity leave for the past few months, in case you missed it. And to be honest, she did most of the work around here, so Hank is pretty exhausted.

We originally planned to just go dark. You all have been incredibly supportive when we’ve needed to take short breaks to recoup and plan our next moves, so we figured we could probably get away with just not publishing for most of August. 

But that didn’t sit quite right with us. And besides, we have a lot of exciting announcements we want to tell you about this month! Plus, our birthday is coming up, and you know we wouldn’t miss celebrating it — heat be damned. 

So Hank took a page from Tom Sawyer and invited all his friends to paint this fence while he goes and hangs out by the swimming hole. 

More than a dozen of us “classically trained” journalists in Arizona have made the jump to running our own independent newsletters on Substack in the past few years (including Caitlin and Curt, who recently launched our new sister publication, the Tucson Agenda!). We’re spread out across the state, covering all sorts of different issues, from politics to towns to the border and LGBTQ+ issues and more, picking up the slack of the dying corporate legacy outlets and innovating our craft. 

But building an audience is hard work! As one of the gray-haired newsletters in the bunch, we at the Arizona Agenda thought it would be fun to introduce our audience to some of the new kids on the block. 

That way, the Agenda doesn’t have to go dark, Hank can take a little vacation and catch up on to-dos, the other great newsletters in this state can get exposure to a new audience, and you readers get to learn about other cool local news options. Everyone wins!  

So we invited them to write guest posts about who they are and what it is they do here. And we’re organizing a little get-together to think about how we can better collaborate, share resources and trade tips, tricks and thoughts on the trade. Perhaps we can create a little Arizona Newsletter Alliance. 

Starting Monday, we’re going to turn over the Agenda to a rotating cast of characters who you might not know yet. They’re all doing great independent journalism in Arizona. You’ll see their work on Mondays and some Wednesdays this month. 

We’ve also got some big changes and plans coming up, and a birthday. So we’ll tell you about those — and give you another lowdown on how our business is going — on Fridays.

Finally, as we take some time off to rest and reflect on the last two years building this tiny local news empire and plotting where the Agenda is going next, we want to hear from you! 

One of the major drawbacks of Substack is we have no clue who you are unless we recognize your email address. Substack does it that way because they don’t want a site populated by data scrapers and people collecting your information just to sell it — they want writers selling their words. But it leaves us a little in the dark as to who we’re exactly writing for. 

You readers are the whole reason we exist, and we’d like to know more about you! So we’re going to send you a few questions and surveys this month: Who are you? What do you like about the Agenda? What can we do better? That kind of thing. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to tell us. 

We’ll be back in full swing in September. In the meantime, we’re excited to hear more about you, tell you about our plans and introduce you to some of our newsletter-slinging friends!

-Hank and Rachel